Things We Weren't Meant To Know
by Haleine Delail
Summary: When a line of inquiry leads the Doctor and Martha into the inner sanctum of a great and famous scientist, through his works and his life story, they begin to realise that there are simply some stories that the two of them are not supposed to hear.
1. Chapter 1

**Okay... here we go again! **

**And as it appeared that my last story's ending was a bit to REAL for some folks (perhaps there was too much that went unsaid, that I assumed everyone would just FEEL... perhaps I'm a little like the Doctor that way) I hope everyone is enthralled by this, and gets excited again :-) . **

**I keep wondering if this first chapter is a bit too mundane... but I promise, most of what happens here has a bearing on later events.**

**Thanks for all your kind words and for caring enough to review/like/dislike, and everything in between! Have fun!**

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><p><span>ONE<span>

"Congratulations, Dana!" Martha Jones gushed, hugging her friend, the former Miss Dana Castleford, the brand-new Mrs. William Chin.

"Aw, thanks, Martha," Dana said, looking radiant in her strapless sequined white gown and upswept strawberry blonde hair. "I'm so glad you could make it. Your mum said you've been travelling a lot, so I wasn't sure…"

Martha glanced to her left, where her mum was shaking hands with the groom. The two ladies caught eyes, and exchanged annoyed looks. "Oh, she did?" asked Martha sweetly. "Please! I wouldn't have missed this for the world!"

"Well, meet my husband, Bill," Dana said. She touched her new spouse on the shoulder and Martha smiled and reached out for a handshake. Dana looked over Martha's head and cast her eyes about the room, then leaned in sideways, close to Martha's ear. She mumbled, "So where's the guy I saw you with earlier? _Very_ nice, that one."

Martha blushed.

"Hello, I'm Bill, your husband of eight seconds," said the groom, playfully smacking his bride lightly on the arm with the outside of his fingertips. "What's the matter with you?"

Martha giggled at Bill, then answered, "I think he must have gone to the gents'. Sorry about that."

It wasn't a lie – he _had _gone to the gents', but only because Francine Jones had impolitely asked him to stay out of the receiving line. He had agreed, as it was the path of least resistance. Martha reckoned it was because people would ask a lot of questions about him that Francine couldn't answer, many of which the man himself couldn't answer. In fact, Francine had advised Martha not to bring him at all, but of course, Martha hadn't listened, because she had wanted him there with her. She couldn't bear being the guest at another wedding, without a 'plus one,' even if he was just a friend.

The Doctor had said he was "rubbish at weddings," but had happily agreed to go to this one with Martha. He'd wondered aloud if perhaps he'd be "a bit less rubbish" if he didn't know anyone there.

And when she had said, "Erm, you should know... they're going to think you're my boyfriend. I mean, I won't tell them that you are, but my family think you are, and people make assumptions anyway, you know. And… well, it's a wedding and everyone has a date, and I'm not exactly anxious to correct them if they think we're..."

"Then don't correct them," he had shrugged. "It's none of their business what we get up to."

And outside the church when Dana's mother had said, "Hi, you must be Martha's new young man we've been hearing so much about!"

He'd said, "And you must be the sister of the bride," shaking her hand, expertly avoiding answering the question, and completely disarming her.

So, after Bill's little joke, the newlyweds, and Francine and Martha, laughed, then made their _au revoirs_, in order to let a new batch of people through the receiving line.

"How long are you two planning on staying?" Francine asked, taking Martha's arm as they made their way to a table on the other side of the room, where the Jones family, and all of their 'plus ones' had been assigned to sit.

Martha looked at her mother in disbelief. "Mum, stop it. Dana is _my_ friend, mine and Tish's. If anything, I have more of a right to be here than you do!"

"But you know how nosy that family is!"

"So they'll be less nosy if the Doctor and I sneak out scandalously early?" asked Martha. "Yeah, _that_ wouldn't be tacky at all."

"What am I supposed to tell them?"

"Nothing. Everything. Whatever, mum," Martha sighed. "Make something up. Tell the truth. I don't care."

Francine stopped and looked at her. "Tell the truth? The truth is that I have no idea what his name is, where he's from, who he is, how you met, what kind of doctor he is, how old he is or why you never told anyone about him. Not bloody likely, sweetheart!"

"It doesn't matter. Whatever you tell them, or don't tell them, you're going to have to do it whether we're here or not."

"Look, Martha, it doesn't have to be some sort of scandal, not if we have a good story. You can just… you know, tell them you're leaving for Guam in the morning, and you had to make it an early night. You could be going on one of those Doctors Without Borders missions together. Then they won't whisper about why you're leaving. Or, maybe _he's_ going on his own, and you could stay at the party…"

"Mum, we're staying. Both of us. We're going to have dinner, a few drinks, we're going to dance and eat cake and listen to Dana's dad give the drunken speech… the whole kit 'n' caboodle. And we're not leaving until the wine runs dry and the DJ packs it in, all right? Just get over it."

"Fine," said Francine, as she turned her head toward their table. "Now, what are we going to do about this one?" She looked disdainfully at her other daughter, Tish, and her new beau, sitting in their own corner of the world as though no-one else existed. They were smiling giddily at each other and had their foreheads pressed together, and occasionally, they would smooch, or touch each others' nose.

Martha resisted the urge to groan. If she fostered her mother's disapproval of her sister's boyfriend, then she'd have no leg to stand on when Francine dug into the Doctor.

"We're not going to do anything about _this one_ either, because Tish fancies him, and we _used to _be an equal-opportunity family, remember?"

"But…"

"Mum, just behave. I'm not having Dana's wedding reception turning into another night like Leo's birthday," Martha said. "Why can't you have a simple, nice time with friends, and be polite?"

"You are so rude," Francine whined as Martha led her by the hand. "I wish you could hear how you sound."

"There's nothing wrong with my hearing."

As they neared the table, Francine made her way round to the left to sit beside Tish, and Martha decided to take a seat beside the new bloke in her sister's life.

"Hi," a voice said from her left, just as she was reaching out for her chair. A tall Time Lord in a tux was sauntering up, hands in pockets, chewing on something. Probably one of those tiny banana-flavoured cordial cakes from D'Adamio's Bakery – he had raved about them when they'd first arrived at the reception hall. He pulled out her chair for her, then helped her scoot in after she sat. Then he took a seat beside her. "How was the receiving line?"

"A thrill," Martha told him. "Chills, spills. Met Bill." She chuckled at her little joke.

"Ho ho, aren't you cute?" he asked delightedly.

"Hello, Doctor," Tish chirped. "How've you been?"

"Oh, hey Tish. Sorry we didn't have a chance to say hello at the church. I've been all right," he shrugged. "You?"

"Great, thanks to this guy here. I'd like you to meet Robert Oliver," Tish said, gesturing toward the man beside her. "Sweetheart, this is the Doctor."

"Ah yes," Robert Oliver said, reaching out to shake the Doctor's hand. "I've heard _so_ much about you!"

Martha held back from rolling her eyes. Robert seemed a decent enough man, but he was, to put it mildly, a pretentious twit. He looked a little bit like a young Bill Cosby, only shorter and much less cool. From an earlier conversation with Tish, Martha knew that the man was from Chiswick, and had studied computer science at Edinburgh. But he spoke with a highly affected imitation RP, the sort that only the Royals, and people who wanted to sound like the Royals, use. When he'd spoken, it had come out sounding like, "Ah yuzz. I've hod seeeew much aboat yoh."

"Oh, lovely," the Doctor sighed. "What do you do then, Robert?"

"Actually, Doctor, sorry," Tish interjected. "It's Robert Oliver."

"Robert Oliver," the Doctor repeated. It was half concession, half question.

"Worry not, Doctor, it's a dreadfully common mistake," Robert Oliver said. "Many people assume that Oliver is my surname, when in fact, it is my middle name. I do wish to be addressed by both my first and middle name, if you please."

Again, Martha held back from gagging. He was pleasant, but sickening at the same time. That took talent.

"As you like," the Doctor said. "I'm not one to judge… especially on names."

"Well, to answer your question," said Robert Oliver. "I am Chief Systems Analyst at Waters & Johnson accounting."

"Oh," the Doctor replied, nodding, no surprise nor particular emotion showing on his face. Robert Oliver and Tish seemed to wait for him to tell them how impressed he was, but the Doctor didn't budge (or even notice).

* * *

><p>Dinner was served buffet-style, and it was decent. Though, the champagne was a cut above, and the speeches were surprisingly subdued. Everyone loved the gown and the ice sculpture, they oohed and aahed over the rings and the flowers and the bridesmaids' powder blue dresses from Vera Wang. The baked goods from D'Adamio's, however, were the stars of the show, as they had provided the appetizer banana cordial cakes, as well as the wedding cake itself. And after the cake and coffee were served, Martha looked across the table, and Tish and Robert Oliver were feeding each other lemon custard frosting off their fingers. And giggling. Loudly.<p>

This time, she couldn't hold in the disgust she felt. She shuddered and went "bleah," though her sister did not hear.

But the Doctor did. "You okay?"

She looked at him, feeling a familiar sort of frustration. She was well aware that in spite of her general dislike of Robert Oliver and their chronic _ickyness_, her specific conempt for their relationship stemmed, at least in part, from jealousy. Happy couples were not exactly her favourite kind of people to spend time with these days, and this infuriating man sitting on her left was the reason why.

She stole another painful glance at her sister, then said, "Can we please get away from this table for a while?"

"Sure," he said, pushing back from the table and putting down his fork. "Do you want to dance?"

"Yes. I do," she said with a bit too much relief, and she stood up quickly, like a rocket.

When they reached the polished parquet floor, _Fly Me To the Moon_ was playing, and the Doctor took her hand and said, "I think they're playing our song."

She faced him, and placed her left hand on his shoulder, and they began to move a little, though the space was crowded. She smiled. "I suppose they are!"

He dropped his voice half an octave to say, with exaggerated airs, "Do you remember the night we met, darling?"

"Oh, it was lovely! How could I forget basking in the Earthlight? And finding dead body on the floor, and almost suffocating to death myself? What a memorable night!" she said, matching his low tone with some extended sarcasm. He smiled at her.

After a beat, she said, "Thanks for taking me away from that table."

"Anytime," he replied. "Maybe that's just my role in your life, to airlift you out of your family drama."

"Yeah. How sad is that?"

"Ah, it's all right. Everyone's got an annoying family. Even me. At some point."

"I bet you never had a Robert Oliver in your family."

"Can't say as I did. He's a Systems Analyst? Blimey, at the very least I thought he'd be an International Baccalaureate Professor with a specialisation in classical poetry."

"I know! Ugh!"

"He just doesn't act like a computer guy," the Doctor observed.

"No, he acts like a bloody superior twit," she spat.

"Oh, come on," he urged. "He's all right. Just give him a chance. Think about it: your mum hates us both – the least we can do is give Robert Oliver some support. He'd probably do it for me."

"But you're not my…" she sighed.

"No, but they don't know that, do they?" asked the Doctor.

"But what is that, wanting to be called Robert Oliver? They probably call him Bob at home. It's so pretentious!"

"I want to be called _the Doctor_. In certain circles, that could be construed as pretentious, too."

"And _what_ is with the accent? Did you hear that?"

"I'm not exactly speaking in my native drawl right now either," he pointed out.

"Doctor, could you just let me have my bit of indignation, please?"

"Sorry, please carry on with your irrational ravings," he said, rolling his eyes at her, with a sly smile.

She laughed a little bit at herself. "Fine. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt."

"Now see," he said, smiling. "Was that so hard?"

She sighed heavily. "No. I just don't get what my sister sees in that guy."

"Martha, you have to give your sister a break, too," the Doctor advised. "She doesn't have…"

He had stopped short and averted his eyes to the floor, and Martha had no idea where he was going with that sentence.

"She doesn't have what?" she asked. "Whatever it is you're about to say about my sister, I won't be upset."

"Don't get me wrong, she's great, but she's not you. She doesn't have your brains or your talent or your looks. She's not even in the same ballpark."

"What?"

"And we can't ask her to change, because _you're_ extraordinary. She, like almost everyone else in existence who is _not_ extraordinary, has to make do. Be patient with her. And with him."

Martha stared at the Doctor with disbelief. She was glad he was leading, because she'd lost track of her dance steps. _Extraordinary brains, talent, looks._ Had she heard right? Her eyes locked onto his, searching, willing the moment to reverse itself, pass again, so she could hear it, experience it for a second time.

But it did not, and no flash of anything similar shone in his eyes again. But the two travellers danced together for another hour, and left arm-in-arm, just after watching Tish and Robert Oliver stumble out of the place barely able to keep their hands off each other. The Doctor had said that Tish didn't possess Martha's best qualities; secretly, Martha added _decorum_ to that list.


	2. Chapter 2

**Wow! I can't believe how many of you responded to Chapter 1! I'm feeling a lot of pressure to deliver something awesome now! Thanks so much!**

**Upon reflection, it is occurring to me that the Doctor and Martha are much chattier, much easier with the banter here, than they "really" are. I like dialogue, I like characters making little jokes, and I think that the two of them could be, and were, like this together. Both clever, both in touch with reality...**

**And, someone's review was speculating over exactly when this takes place. Certain revelations in this chapter will cause that question to come up again... but I'm not planning on specifying. Just suspend disbelief for a while. The Doctor already knows Martha's family, but the family still thinks the Doctor is her boyfriend. They've been travelling together long enough to have a very easy, open rapport with a little bit of flirtation, which Martha can participate in, having come to terms with her feelings. And, it's clearly before the Master comes into their lives. Perhaps there ISN'T a good time for this story to take place... it just IS!**

**You'll find that TWO rather important original characters have been introduced now. Perhaps Martha's being a tad judgemental, though we have already explored a few reasons as to why, and she will elaborate more here. Enjoy!**

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><p><span>TWO<span>

The Doctor pushed the key into the little brass lock of the TARDIS, parked a block away from Dana and Bill's reception hall, and said, "So, I never asked: how do you know Dana?"

"Oh, just from school," Martha answered as he held the door open for her. "We went all the way through together, starting from primary school. We lived down the street from each other, and she got to know Tish too, and her parents got to know my parents… We only separated when we went off to university, but we always kept in touch by email."

"I had a friend like that," the Doctor said. "Went through all of our training together – there was a group of us, in fact. Lincomb was his name, only, I never knew his parents or anything. He was special… different from the rest of us."

Martha blinked. "Wow. I've just so seldom heard you talk about the good old days."

"Well…" he mused, leaning against the console, hand against the back of his neck. "I guess I feel… a little loose tonight. More inclined to talk."

"Loose?"

"Yeah," he shrugged. "You know. No pressure to save civilisation, drinking a little wine, dancing with you. I feel loose. In spite of the tux."

She smiled. "Good! I was afraid my family had driven you to self-mutilation or something."

"Nah, they're fine," he dismissed with a wave of his hand. Then he crossed his arms over his chest and looked at her frankly. "Now, go ahead, I know you want to."

"Want to what?"

"Robert Oliver and your sister. Do it. Lay it on me."

She sighed heavily. "Did you see them when they left?"

"Yes."

"It's like, _get a room!_"

"Well, Martha, I reckon that's exactly what they were heading out to do."

She crinkled her nose. "Ew. I mean, before, I just thought he was pretentious, but now I actually find him repellent."

"Just because we now have fairly solid evidence that he's shagging your sister? You didn't know that before?"

"I did, but I don't need to see _evidence_," she told him. "Why can't they just leave the room quietly, holding hands like we did?"

"Because…"

"I know," she sighed, annoyed. "We're not leaving the party breathless and on fire."

"Sorry. I should just let you rant. I told you to lay it on me, so…"

Of course the Doctor had no idea the real source of her annoyance, but that was nothing new.

"He's wearing a four-hundred-pound tie with a suit that looks like a hand-me-down from his father, purchased in 1982," she complained.

"Rant, but don't be a snob," he warned. "If you're going to do that, I'm going to bed."

"No, I'm not being a snob. I'm just saying, if he's wearing hand-me-downs, that's fine! Embrace it! If he's from Chiswick, he should speak like he's from Chiswick! He shouldn't try to gloss it over with shiny things and a fake accent!"

"Okay. Fair enough, but Martha…"

"Hello? Let me rant?"

He held up his hands in a gesture of surrender, and waited.

"I swear, I'm not a snob, Doctor, it's not about that," she insisted, throwing her royal blue silk wrap over a railing, and her tiny purse onto the console. "I can handle almost any type of person. Rich, poor, doctors, lawyers, plumbers, barmen, whatever… even systems analysts. As long as they own up to who and what they are."

"That's fair."

"And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with a person trying to _better_ themselves, but... it's Chiswick. There's nothing in the world wrong with it! Not, posh but… please, it's not like he grew up in the slums, or his parents are serial killers. What does he need to hide it for?"

"Well, speaking as someone who feels the need to hide his background sometimes… I can honestly say that I don't know. And that's the whole point. You don't know what kind of battle he's fighting on the inside, Martha."

"But Doctor, you're from _a different planet_, and you occasionally try to pass as human because otherwise, you'd get thrown into a locked cell in Nevada eighty feet underground and probed by a team of specialists. You don't try to pretend that you're not a Time Lord because you're ashamed. It is not the same thing!"

"Martha, did you ever think that perhaps he's trying to impress your mother?"

"Yes, I thought about that. But he can't let my mum turn him into something he's not. Is he really that weak of character?"

"Well, again, she doesn't like either one of us. Maybe we should just shut up and support him."

"Because he'd do it for you?" she asked, crossing her arms, cocking a sceptical eyebrow.

"He probably would."

"Unless maybe he thought it would upset my mum."

"Well, maybe. But you might be surprised, Martha."

She sighed. "I don't know, Doctor. I just don't happen to trust a person who tries to hide where they come from. I think it means that when the chips are down, they will not draw from what they know is right in their gut, they will draw from what they think people want to see. And that doesn't bode well for a future with my sister. If something goes wrong…"

The Doctor nodded. "Okay, I see what you're saying. I'm not saying I agree, but I understand you."

"Plus!" she cried out, shooting one finger into the air. "He uses _way_ too much French in casual conversation!"

"Go to bed, Martha," he suggested, with a bemused half-smile. He began to walk toward the archway which led to the rest of the TARDIS. "You need to sleep on this. _J'espère que tu auras des rêves agréables, ma belle."_

She clicked her tongue with irritation, then gathered up her belongings and followed him down the hall. "Eugh, you're such a smartass. But I hope you have pleasant dreams, too, Doctor."

* * *

><p>She had one of those dreams that must have been intense and fraught with meaning and imagery and prescient warnings for the future… but that one forgets as soon as one fully wakes. She hated those. She happened to believe in the power of dreams, or more accurately, the power of the subconscious, and she was reluctant to let go of them in the daylight. Sometimes, she even made a point to sit still in the morning and put back together the images she'd seen in her slumber, in order to commit them to memory.<p>

But she could not interact with her dream this time because there was an agitated Time Lord in her bedroom, tittering about his own nocturnal visions. Plus, it was not morning, she had not had a full night's rest, and she was being awakened from a deep slumber.

"Sorry, Martha," he said, seeing her jolt out of her sleep. "I didn't mean to scare you. But I have to talk."

She rubbed her eyes and attempted to focus on him. He was sitting on the bed leaning back on his hands, and his hair was in an even greater state of disarray than usual. He was dressed in the striped sleepwear he'd been sporting when they met, the ensemble that he called "Howard's Pyjamas," though she had no idea why.

"Why, what's wrong?" she groaned, trying to sit up.

"I had a dream about my friend Lincomb."

"Your friend from school?"

"Yeah," he answered with an intense exhale. "And it's got me all tied up in knots. I feel like…"

"What?" she asked, after a pause.

"I feel like I'm supposed to do something, like something _huge _is calling out to me and I just need to follow its voice."

"Keep talking. I'll catch up," she said wearily.

"Remember I told you there was a group of us, but that Lincomb was special?"

"Yes, I remember," she told him.

"Well, he was different because he wasn't a Time Lord."

She paused, waited for more information. When none was forthcoming, she asked, "Then who was he?"

"He was from a planet called Sorofrann," he explained in his machine-gun language, to which Martha had more or less adapted by now. "It was a kind of sister-planet with Gallifrey. Same size, same shape, similar life cycles and eco-systems, similar humanoid appearance of the inhabitants… Anyway, Lincomb had come from the ancient Mundry Battlement in the Western Hemisphere of the planet, where the most developped cities and city-states were located."

She tried to register what she was hearing. From what he had told her that day in the under-city of New New York, all of the close-minded councils and hard-lined rules from which the Doctor had fled all those years ago, and which had helped lead to the great Time War, she had gathered that the Doctor's planet and people had been rather xenophobic, or at least quite exclusivist. She couldn't quite wrap her mind around a non-Time Lord receiving Time Lord training.

"But… don't Time Lords have special abilities," she asked, shutting her eyes tight, concentrating on the task at hand. "I mean, like encoded in the DNA?"

"Well, yeah," he shrugged. "And two hearts, a respiratory bypass system, and regenerative powers, none of which the Sorofranese had. But the laws of time and space can be learned, at least at a rudimentary level, by anyone. Only a Time Lord can have full perspective over it, can fully interface with a TARDIS to navigate the vortex, can feel the flux of time and space and the moments that define the universe… but anyone can learn the theory behind it."

"I see."

"At the time, when I was a kid, it was rare, but occasionally, a scholarship of sorts could be awarded to someone from Sorofrann to be educated on Gallifrey. Every few hundred years, someone was allowed to come through the Gallifreyan school system. The elders thought it would be a good way to ensure maximum efficiency in communications, should an intergalactic battle ever arise. Fat lot of good."

"So… what was your dream?"

He looked at her with penetrating dark eyes and a furrowed brow. "The dream was nothing special. No events, no words, just a jumble of images, like a rock music video. But I think it's trying to tell me that he's… out there, maybe needs me… I don't know. I feel like I've left the iron on and..."

"How could he be out there? I thought you said the Sorofrann people can't regenerate like you can. I mean, if you knew him when you were a child, wouldn't that make him…"

"Nine hundred odd years old? Yeah. But the Sorofranese have a singularly long life-span, even though they can't regenerate. The average life is fifteen hundred years or so. But when they die, they die."

"Wow. They just… age and age and age?"

"Well, you're missing the point Martha! There is no reason to believe that he didn't go home to Sorofrann after completing his training on Gallifrey. Do you know what this means?" he asked, excited and subdued all at the same time. This demeanour let Martha know that he was being cautious about his feelings, holding back from becoming too optimistic about the connection, too frantic about the omen.

"Yes. That he probably wasn't on Gallifrey when it was destroyed, and someone from your past, from your childhood, might still be alive."

He smiled weakly, and his body slumped. "Exactly, Martha."

"And you had to wake me up to tell me?"

"I couldn't sleep until I said it out loud to someone," he said, standing up, beginning to pace. "Do you think I'm completely daft?"

"For what? Having hope? Absolutely not."

"For grasping at straws."

"You're not grasping at straws," she assured him. "You said yourself that a Time Lord has perspective over time and space. When you dream, you don't just dream, you see through the fabric of reality, yeah? Clairvoyant-like."

Her words got to him. She was just a little too on-the-money. He'd had no idea just how well she understood him.

"It's been over eight centuries since I've seen him… he's probably long-since got over Gallifrey and his memories there…" he said, contemplating, fidgeting.

"But the important thing is that he still _has_ memories, Doctor. Someone else shares your memories. That's _huge._"

"That's what I was thinking."

"And if you think he needs you… something's calling you…"

"We should go. What do you think?" he wanted to know. He stopped pacing and faced her. His eyes betrayed desperation and worry, like a frightened child.

Martha was puzzled by the fact that he was asking her opinion. She reckoned that this must be a mightily emotional moment for him, a stirring of his Time Lord senses that was bothering him even more than he was letting on.

She thought about her answer, and took it seriously. She spoke the truth. "I think you've got to reach out, Doctor. If you don't do it, you'll wonder until you drive yourself barmy, and possibly until it's too late."

He smiled. "Thanks."

"Honestly, Doctor, I don't understand why you need me for this. You know what you need to do."

"It's just… this dream, it rattled my cage a bit, you know? No clear images, just a great big punch in the gut of memories and adrenaline and infernal hope. I needed you to tell me I wasn't completely out of my mind."

"Well…"

"Okay, at least not about this."

"Not about this. You're well within your rights to want to check it out, Doctor. Your people are gone, and this Lincomb might be the last vestige of connection to your homeland."

Suddenly, he looked disturbed, worried in a different way than he'd been a few minutes before. "Hope. You used the word hope."

"Yes. Hope. It's good. What about it?"

"Just… you also used the word clairvoyant."

"Okay. And that means…?"

"I've definitely got the very strong sense that I'm not being knocked up from my sleep across time and space to visit an old friend, just to say hello."


	3. Chapter 3

**The mystery is only going to deepen here. I hope that you don't feel like this is a wild goose chase when you get to the end of this chapter! ;-)**

* * *

><p><span>THREE<span>

Martha climbed out of bed and pulled on a pair of jeans and black boots, a white v-neck tee shirt and the retro-chic black leather jacket she'd been wearing yesterday afternoon. She pushed her hair back from her face with a wire headband, but let it hang to her shoulders. On her way out, she grabbed a matching set of grey fleece gloves and a scarf, just in case.

She met a nervous Doctor in the console room, now having changed out of Howard's Pyjamas into a brown suit with the usual trainers, and his tan trench coat.

Normally, the jog down the ramp and out the door was exhilirating. Usually, they were fuelled by the open road, the thrill of what might be. But today, they did not jog, they walked apprehensively and opened the door upon the planet Sorofrann, home of the Doctor's childhood friend Lincomb…

…and they were greeted by a sight that took the Doctor's breath away. She could hear the little hitch as he struggled to keep his respiration functioning.

Stretching into the horizon in every direction, they could see miles and miles of brown, desolate landscape, punctuated by what looked to be the ruins of buildings.

"Holy Mother of…" the Doctor gasped. "Is this Sorofrann? What the hell happened here?"

He began to walk forward away from the TARDIS like a zombie, his eyes and mouth wide open with disbelief. Martha followed, and decided not to say anything. No questions necessary just now; he'd begin narrating when he got ready.

"Martha, look," he mused, pointing at various things absently, as though any of it could take shape within her mind, as though she had any frame of reference.

"I know, Doctor," she responded, rather blankly.

"This is supposed to be a city," he told her. "It was called Weldlow's Fort, the capital of the region and the mightiest fortressed city in the galaxy. And look – all of the ramparts have fallen. Wha… I just don't understand!"

He abruptly stopped walking and turned in place, three-hundred-sixty degrees, and repeated himself. "I don't understand."

"Well," she offered weakly, trying to be of help. "It looks like the tallest buildings are over that way. Maybe there's something left. Someone, I mean."

He nodded, and actually let her lead the way. The place was so flattened, so far in disrepair that Martha _could_ lead with no trouble. Nothing impeded their view or their progress. It was a simple trek across some dirt.

Much to their surprise, as they got closer to what used to be the city of Weldlow's Fort, they realised that Martha had been right. Someone was left alive. Here and there, they could see humanoid beings moving about, though very brusquely, as though on a mission. No-one was stopping to chat, to check their text messages or eating a sandwich on the go. It was strictly business.

"They must have underground reserves of supplies, and… well, makeshift arrangements so that what's left of the buildings doesn't collapse," the Doctor speculated.

And as they got even closer, they realised that all of the beings moving about were wearing roughly the same white uniform of some sort. The Doctor did not take long after that to see that those milling about were the cat nuns, nurses he had come across on New Earth, those who cared for the seriously infirm and had used humans as an antidote farm. When he met them, he'd seen that they were a bit ruthless, but brilliant. Although, nurse Hame's order had gone a long way in redeeming them, showing that they were not all conniving, at-all-cost sorts of beings, and she proved herself capable of great sacrifice by caring for the Face of Boe for more than twenty years.

But the cats were severely out of their time here – five billion years out of their time.

Martha realised it a minute or so after he did, and asked, "Are they… well, what are they doing here?" She even smiled a bit at the strangeness of seeing the cats again.

And just as she spoke, Martha and the Doctor were noticed. Some cats simply walked past, giving the travellers a good, solid glance. Others stopped and stared, or gathered with a couple of friends to gawk. Some of them smiled warmly, others eyed them with suspicion.

"Hello," the Doctor said to them, waving, though not as boisterously as usual.

After a longer-than-average pause, a voice responded, "Hello, there."

They began to see one cat walking toward them, with a beatific look on her face. She made her way slowly to them, studying them as though she hadn't seen any other humanoids in quite some time. The Doctor reckoned she hadn't.

They met her in the middle of something that had perhaps once been a kind of car park. It was paved, and the vestiges of partitioning ropes surrounded it, though of course, most of the posts had been knocked down.

"You'll have to forgive us for staring," the cat said to the newcomers. "We don't get many visitors here."

"I gathered that," the Doctor said to her, looking about pointedly. "I'm the Doctor, and this is Martha Jones."

"Hello, Doctor, Miss Jones. I'm Nurse Moll," she said cordially. The cats who had gathered began to disperse.

"What happened here? What's destroyed the city?" he asked, surveying the surroundings, squinting to see the damage.

"Time," she answered. "Only time. A plague took hold here two hundred years ago, and the city and dwellings fell into disrepair. Much like the Senate that you saw, the last time you were in New New York."

He smiled. "You know who I am, then?"

"Yes," she conceded. "And Miss Jones as well. Word of the services that you provided to the people of New New York reached us all over the planet."

"But hold on," Martha interjected. "That's five billion years from now, isn't it?"

"Indeed," Moll answered.

"How did you get here?" the Doctor asked.

"We were summoned," she said. "By the Mayor of Weldlow's Fort. When things got bad, when the plague took hold here, he called for us across time. He knew of our lot on New Earth, caring for the remainder of the upper city after the Bliss Patch Virus had gone airborne and thought that we would be the perfect order to help keep Sorofrann alive. Our vows to Divinity and Humanity preclude us from refusing a call for help such as this. So here we are. Our order has been all over Sorofrann for more than one hundred years."

"But _how_ did you get here?" he repeated. "What kind of transport do you use? And come to that, how did the Mayor call you across time? How could he know about what happens on New Earth in the future? Who could do that? Who is the… oh!" A revelation dawned on him then.

"Oh!" Martha whispered.

He turned back to the cat. "Nurse Moll, is the Mayor still alive, or has he been taken by the plague?"

"He lives," she answered. "But not for much longer, I should think. In spite of how it looks, a surprising amount of the population has survived, especially here in the city, but none of them shall survive the year."

"Just out of curiosity, what's his name, the Mayor?"

"He is Mayor Forsey Kent Lincomb," she told him.

The Doctor let out a hot, quick breath, and his face was torn between relief and sadness. "Please take me to him."

The nurse looked at him sceptically. "I don't know, Doctor. He is important and his health is failing. We need him to live as long as possible, and I fear that a visit from a stranger might tax him unduly."

"I'm not a stranger," the Doctor told her gravely. Then his tone changed to his usual joviality. "Besides, I'm the Doctor, he's sickly – you see how that works?"

* * *

><p>The Doctor and Martha were standing in a dark, damp room. Actually, it was not so much a room as an area that happened, by good luck, to have three walls and a slanted roof over it. It was so ruined, they were not able to discern what kind of building it used to be, much less what <em>part<em> of the building they were currently standing in. All they knew was that there was a triangular opening to their left that led out into the orange sunlight of Sorofrann, there were dirt floors, collapsing stone walls, and no place to sit. They were waiting for nurse Moll to return with permission to see them into the Mayor's chamber.

They waited ages, and Martha was very glad she'd brought her gloves and scarf. The place was cold in the dark, under the heavy bricks through which none of the sun's heat could soak.

"Doctor?" a voice said from the shadows. It was a feminine voice, and the Doctor assumed it was another nurse.

"Yes," he said, perking up and looking toward where the voice had come from.

She stepped into the semi-light. She was an older cat than Moll, and she introduced herself. "I'm Nurse Croth. I attend to the Mayor. He wishes to see you, but I must insist that you keep your visit short. His health is in great decline. Please follow me."

"Wait, don't we need, like, masks or something?" the Doctor wanted to know.

The nurse chuckled. "If you were going to catch the plague, it would have happened by now. It has long since mutated and ceased to be airborne. You're safe. Only those already infected are in danger."

The Doctor swallowed hard and nodded, then took Martha by the hand. They followed Croth into the shadows and her lamp led the way into the pitch dark. They went down an extremely narrow corridor which used to be much less narrow, and at one point, they were obliged literally to turn sideways as they made their way through inky black halls. Then, the walls opened up onto a smallish rotunda with a few windows still intact high up. From there, they found a relatively sturdy stone staircase and went up, warned by Croth to watch out for crumbling beneath their feet.

At the top of the stairs, they looked over a railing into a pit of fallen rubble, where some vines had grown in, and it sounded like some small animals scuttled about, as though they had found a haven for themselves. And once more, they turned right, and nurse Croth indicated a large red door. It was less than twenty feet away from where the building had sunk, and the Doctor looked at her with an air of concern.

"I know what you're thinking," she said. "But they collapsed this part of the building on purpose… that is to say, they coaxed it the rest of the way, in order to find extra stone to reinforce the Mayor's quarters. The builders worked beneath the Mayor's floor for weeks, before the plague got them."

The Doctor nodded with understanding. Then he asked, "May we go in?"

"Yes, Doctor," she said. "I will return in fifteen minutes, and at that time I will ask you to conclude your meeting with the Mayor."

"Sure," he agreed, then took Martha's hand again.

He knocked softly on the red door, and a weak voice from inside said, "Enter."

A large bed covered by a red velvet canopy sat incongruously in the middle of a room which seemed to have been sewn together like the Frankenstein monster, only from pieces of stone. An elderly man lay in the middle of the bed, surrounded by lush red blankets and fluffy pillows.

The Doctor approached the bed carefully, and Martha followed. When his eyes fell upon those of his old friend, they filled with tears.

"Lincomb," he whispered, reaching out.

Lincomb's hand snaked out of the blankets with a bit of effort and grasped the Doctor's with desperation. "Doctor."

The Doctor smiled. "How do you know me? I wasn't even called that the last time you saw me." His voice cracked and strained, and the tears spilled out. The sight of that was very upsetting to Martha, and she couldn't help but shed a few tears herself. She felt pain at the sight of the old, sick man, pain at the sight of her unfairly energetic Doctor, sadness trickling down his youthful face.

Lincomb smiled back. "You know the answer to that."

"Look at you," the Doctor whispered, squeezing his friend's hand harder, and going to his knees to be closer, to lean in.

"I've got a bit of a bug," Lincomb said. His eyes shifted to Martha. "Hello, Miss Jones."

"Hello, Mr. Lincomb," she choked out with more effort than she would have liked. "It's nice to meet you."

"And you," he said, attempting a cordial bow of his head.

"You've seen her before, haven't you?" asked the Doctor.

"Not as such," said Lincomb. "I've seen images of her, vestigial burnings that come across time. Her, and others of your companions… some of whom you've not even met yet! But, this one is special."

The Doctor smiled fondly at Martha. "She is."

"I mean, she's special among the special," Lincomb insisted. He managed a wink at the Doctor.

The Doctor and Martha avoided each others' eyes, though neither one of them really had any idea to what Lincomb could be referring. And after a few moments, Lincomb began speaking again. "After the Time War, Doctor, I heard that you were the sole survivor, and I began looking for you…"

"You always were resourceful. Images across time."

"Indeed. I learned a lot about you, was able to gather where you went after leaving Gallifrey, and what you've been doing since then. Until two hundred years ago, I didn't know. It's also how I learned of the cats, through my searches through time and space for you. I wasn't able to catch up to you for a while, so I compromised by calling them in to help us. They have been… well, everyone would be dead without them."

"Doctor," Martha whispered. "Can you explain this to me later?"

He looked up at her. "What he did is strictly technology and mathematics and research," the Doctor told her, in lieu of explanation. But it satisfied the question of how Lincomb was able to accomplish all of this without a Time Lord's psyche and physiological makeup to work with. At least it satisfied her for now.

"That's right, Dr. Jones," Lincomb said to her. "Oh, sorry. Not yet – please forgive me, _Miss_ Jones. But your handsome friend is right. I was, as you must know, trained in Gallifreyan schools, alongside the Time Lords."

"The Doctor told me as much, yes."

"A Time Lord can almost literally wield the vortex within his mind to see through it, much as a TARDIS can wield the vortex within its heart," Lincomb told Martha. "But we regular folk, we use equations and electricity and mad, rigged-up, possibly nuclear retrofitted binoculars to accomplish what they can, just by closing their eyes and thinking certain thoughts. It's not as slick, but…"

Lincomb had strained himself. He began to cough.

"Well," the Doctor whispered, giving his old friend both of his hands. "I'm glad you got it done."

"I'm glad you got my message."

The Doctor smirked. "I had a feeling it wasn't just a dream."

"Indeed not," Lincomb agreed. "I have a mission for you."

"Save your planet," the Doctor whispered. It wasn't a question.

Lincomb nodded weakly. "It's what you do, or so I have learned. Can you help me sit up, please?"

The Doctor stood, and gestured with his head for Martha to go to the other side of the bed. Each of them took Lincomb by one arm and heaved him gently up into a sitting position. Martha adjusted some of his tubes that had got folded or twisted in the process. He thanked her sincerely, then invited them each to sit on the edge of the bed.

"The plague that has nearly killed my planet, it's affectionately known as _Incognita_, as in _malatia incognita_."

"Unknown disease?" Martha asked.

"Precisely," answered Lincomb. "Because no-one in two hundred years has been able to discern the origin. Anyone who has tried has fallen ill and failed. I'd have tried it myself, but biology is not my area of expertise. The best I could do was to react – I could not prevent."

"It's all right," Martha assured him, patting his hand.

"All of our doctors, nurses, scientists and anyone else who could possibly have done any good here, they're all dead. No headway was made in discovering the cause or inception of the disease. Part of the problem is that it mutates so bloody quickly, no-one can get a handle on it."

"Well, I haven't used my bioengineering facilities in the TARDIS in quite a while, but we can try," the Doctor said. He looked at Martha. "Can't we?"

"Absolutely," she agreed.

"No, there is someone…" Lincomb began, then coughed heartily. "Sorry," he said, recovering. "There is someone who got much, much further than anyone else in the universe, in studying this disease and discovering its origin. I mean, ten times further. Still, not far enough, but why waste time starting from scratch, eh?"

"Who is that someone?" asked the Doctor.

"That's where you come in. I need you to track him down."

"Ah."

"I found him, sort of, and learned some about his research, but before I could locate him in time and space, I fell too ill to continue working. But I did learn one thing that was fairly useful. Have you ever heard of a bloke who's just known as the Researcher?"

"It rings a bell," said the Doctor. "He's got a name, though – the Researcher is just a nickname that came about because he was so progressive and prolific…"

"…that no other researcher could even touch him, so why bother having any others?" Lincomb finished. "Yeah, that's him."

"Oh," said the Doctor. "He pops up all over the place, here and there and in traces and snippets throughout certain time periods. Shouldn't be too difficult to find him."

Lincomb didn't speak, he just closed his eyes and sighed, and leaned further into his pillow.

"Doctor, time's up," Nurse Croth said from the doorway.

* * *

><p>On the walk back to the TARDIS, crossing a city in two hundred years worth of ruin, Martha asked, "So, we find <em>the Researcher<em>, or whatever his name is, and we help him finish his investigation? And when we have a cure or an antidote, or anything useful, we bring it back here and get Sorofrann back up on its feet?"

"Pretty much. That's if he needs help finishing his research. It may be that he's just in the wrong time period. If that's the case…" he trailed off.

"What?"

"Well, I'm not sure how comfortable I feel saving a civilization from extinction by bringing a cure from the future. It's one of those things… a very grey area, as far as abuses of time travel."

"Shouldn't Lincomb understand that?" Martha asked.

"Sort of," the Doctor said. "It's more something that I feel in my gut, you know? The rights and wrongs of folding time. Sometimes. Other times, the rules are cut and dry…"

"Well, are we still going to go find the Researcher?" she asked.

"Of course," he told her. "I'll have to decide later how to handle the cure, if we find one."


	4. Chapter 4

FOUR

The Doctor was seated upon his navigation chair in the TARDIS console room, staring at figures and symbols literally blipping by on the screen in front of him.

"What's it doing?" Martha asked, wandering out from the kitchen with two toaster strudels and two coffees. She set the coffees down on the console, and handed a pastry to the Doctor on a napkin.

"It's triangulating all references to the Researcher, and coming up with a likely time and place to find him for the purposes we need him for. It should give us time and space coordinates in a few minutes."

"Cool. It's like a time and space SatNav."

They enjoyed their strudel and coffee and chatted while the TARDIS did its good work. At last, a set of gibberish numbers came up on the screen, and the Doctor said, "That's it. I know where to find him."

"Where is he?" she asked, as if she'd even understand the answer.

"He's on the planet known as Seventh From Pluto. Its real name has eighty-two letters, so someone gave it a nickname. It's in a galaxy that neighbours yours. The Researcher's work comes to a head in the year 2065. Not too far off from your day – fifty-eight years on."

"Is he human?" Martha wanted to know, out of curiosity.

"Doubtful," the Doctor said. By 2065, humans have colonized Mars – sort of – but they don't get out of the Milky Way until… oh, much later. Like almost three hundred years later. However, the Researcher is certainly human_oid_, but then, aren't we all?"

"I know I am," she shrugged.

"Well, brace yourself. Next stop: 2065. Let's hope we find what we're looking for… and no more."

"I hear that."

The TARDIS moved. They held on.

Then the TARDIS stopped. They held their breaths.

And exiting the vessel on Seventh From Pluto, Martha and the Doctor experienced a bit of déjà vu. Another empty city, another eerie calm.

"Oh, blimey," he sighed, shoving his hands in his pockets. "Looks like we're too late."

"How did that happen?" Martha asked, shielding her eyes from the sun.

"I guess I missed," he answered, disturbed. "Or the TARDIS gave me _off_ coordinates."

"Is it possible he's here somewhere, still alive?"

"Anything's possible," he answered. "But I'll tell you what. Let's move the TARDIS outside of the city and walk back in."

"Why?"

"Because, look around you, Martha," he said. "Buildings still intact, vegetation still not quite overrunning the place… this isn't like Weldlow's Fort. This city has been emptied in the last eight, nine, ten months… a year, tops. The ravaging of the plague is recent. Putting ourselves at risk is one thing, but I won't risk the TARDIS."

"She could catch it?"

"I have no idea, but it's possible. She's living, she has a physiology of sorts. And if we fall ill, we'll need to be able to count on her to take us out of here. If all of us are out of commission, well…"

"I see."

* * *

><p>And so the two travellers exited the city in a teleporting police box, and re-entered on foot. From far away, they gathered perspective. From far away, the city was still, as it had been up close. A highway of sorts led into the city from the river embankment where they decided to leave their transport, and carrying some rudimentary belongings, they trudged in.<p>

They had no idea whether the virus was airborne or not, whether it was even still living, since everything else was dead. Here, there were no cat nurses; no-one was left that they could see. Martha supposed that they would cross that bridge when they came to it, and deal with the illness if and as it struck. She wasn't used to dealing with Time Lord biology, but she supposed if it came down to treating the Doctor, he couldn't be _that _different from a human, other than the two hearts and respiratory thing… well, she hoped anyway. And the Doctor could certainly care for her if anything happened. Not to mention, if the Researcher was here, and if he was as clever as the Doctor and Lincomb had made him out to be, then perhaps they had backup if they ran into that sort of crisis.

As she looked around, she was reminded of the Stephen King book _The Stand_, with people sitting dead in their cars, trying to escape the inevitable. But no bodies could be seen here. Perhaps everyone died in hospital or at home.

As they passed under the archway that said, "Welcome to Fontana City Centre," they stopped.

"How will we find him in all of this?" she asked.

"I guess we look for the municipal buildings?" he said, putting his hands on his hips and looking around. Martha took a moment to marvel, perhaps inappropriately at a time like this, how strange he looked carrying "gear" on his back, while wearing his usual suit. She had taken the time to put on clothes that worked for the occasion. The Doctor never did any such thing. A strap was fastened round his waist to put some of the burden on his hips rather than his shoulders, but it caused a pin-striped polyester bunch-up around his middle. The tightened shoulder straps had the same effect on his sleeves. It was so strange to see him in any state other than fully kempt. Other than his hair, of course.

"Eugh. Okay," she said, a little discouraged.

"They're bound to have records," he said.

"We don't have his name," Martha pointed out. "It's not like we can just Google him or look him up in a file cabinet. Do they still have file cabinets in 2065?"

"So we'll have to think outside the box," he said. "Look up requests for research grants, bank records, employment histories… _something_ ought to alert us to him. The TARDIS brought us to this exact city for a reason. She got that info from somepleace."

They walked about a half a mile uphill on a man-made highway bridge. When they reached the top, they could see over the city. To Martha, the buildings looked relatively new. The trees weren't very large, the whites were still white, the black on the streets still looked like tar.

And a rather regal-looking structure sat at the end of what looked, from a distance, like a park. It wasn't huge, but it was a bigger building than anything else around, with a peaked roof, mock-Corinthian columns out front, and something that was undoubtedly, once, a spectacular garden. Now it was just vines threatening to overtake the dwelling.

"Let's start there."

* * *

><p>Another mile down the highway slope, across city block after city block, then through the park. At last, they found themselves staring at the regal-looking building they'd seen, just there, across a narrow street. Martha reminded herself that, by no means were they at the end of their journey. This could very well be just the beginning. More clues to lead them further into the unknown, to the next location and the next…<p>

But she sighed with relief anyway. She hadn't had much sleep because the Doctor had awakened her in the middle of it in order to tell her about his dream, and they'd been running ever since. And now, they had just walked two miles from outside the city, _away from_ their teleport. At the very least, it was an opportunity to stop for a few minutes. And it all seemed a bit surreal to Martha, but most things in life with the Doctor seemed a bit surreal.

"Bollocks," the Doctor said. "It's a residence."

"Oh," Martha said, crestfallen. She wasn't sure how the Doctor could tell, given that the buildings didn't seem to have addresses, but she didn't ask. She didn't care. She just wished they could rest for a little while. "Well, can we… maybe we should start here anyway."

"Yeah, yeah, I suppose," he conceded. The six-foot ball of energy was feeling a bit knackered himself.

As they crossed the street, Martha rationalised, "At the very least, it's the biggest house in the neighbourhood. A person who lives here is going to be a pillar of the community, yeah? Lots of info to be had?"

"Makes sense. I hope you're right" he sighed, sonicking the door open.

The Doctor stuck his head inside. Immediately, his nostrils were assailed with a musty smell, the scent of still air, incubating for months on end with no movement. They stepped tentatively inside, and the floorboards creaked.

Straight ahead was the narrow doorway to a kitchen. Martha wandered in there, out of curiosity, and found a space that looked old-fashioned, even to her eyes. Everything around her seemed to be made of wood, and it was covered with white chipping paint.

"Hunh," she said aloud.

"What?" called the Doctor from the foyer.

"Ceramic tile with an ugly rooster hanging on the wall," she said.

"So?"

"It's horrible. Though…"

The Doctor dumped his gear by the door, then began exploring himself. To the left was a large sitting room, decorated with as little furniture as possible, in order to still be presentable as a home. One plain-looking beige sofa with a coffee table, a tiny table and chair by the window with a chess game on-the-go, and some type of hutch in the corner.

Opposite the hutch, there was a staircaise. The Doctor followed the stairs up to a landing, then round the corner again back in the opposite direction. A long balustrade stretched across the living room and looked over, and he could see that the house had multiple rooms upstairs.

"I'm going to go upstairs to explore," he told Martha.

"Wait, I'll come with you."

He started up the stairs, and she caught him up ten seconds later. He started not at the nearest room, but at the one at the end of the hall. He switched on the light, and an office emerged under warm illumination. Books from floor to ceiling on one wall, a great mahogany desk, with a green padded leather chair. What looked like a giant Persian rug was sprawled underneath the desk. The Doctor approached the desk and began to go through the middle drawer, the one that would have been right at the breastbone of the man or woman who sat here.

"Hm," he said. "Ephraim."

"Ephraim?"

"Yes," he muttered. "C.J. Ephraim." He showed her an envelope that had been addressed to this house.

"Okay. What about in the other drawers."

But the Doctor was already opening the envelope "_Dear C.J., Please accept my thanks for the work you have done for our institution. Your work has been invaluable – without your quick thinking and agile hands, we would have been sunk. It's no wonder they call you The Researcher, with a capital R. Sincerely yours…_"

"Who's it from?"

"Does it matter? Anyway, the signature is illegible."

They both exhaled with their hands at their sides, and their shoulders slumped. "Well, we found his house," Martha said. "And learned his name. That's something, right?"

"Yeah. But where is he?"

"I think we both know the answer to that, Doctor," she said sadly. "What do we do?"

"I guess… look for his notes, see if we can finish what he started."

She sighed. "You mean the work that killed him?"

"Yep. We're already swimming in the dust he lived in and the air that he breathed. We've been on this planet for several hours – the damage is done… if there is damage to be done."

"I suppose."

"First step, let's get settled and see what our resources are," he said, going back toward the door. "We'll explore the rest of the house, and then we'll get our things, unpack, and… _su casa es nuestra casa._"

"We're staying here?" she asked following him down the hall.

"Yep. Get a feel for the man, get in his head… whoa!" he exclaimed, opening the door at the top of the stairs. "Get this."

She peeked inside. The room was filled, top to bottom, with debris, and only a narrow aisle leading diagonally to the opposite wall, for access to the room's. "Wow!" she breathed. "Our Researcher was a pack rat."

"All the great ones are," he told her. The Doctor stepped in and looked around. He touched a few things here or there, but mostly he was afraid the stacks would fall if he disturbed them. He picked up an unidentifiable gadget and said, "Never know when you're going to need one of these."

"Oi, mister, you've got rooms like this all over the TARDIS," she chuckled. "All that space for just you, and you fill it with rubbish."

"Not just me," he said. "You're there too."

"Well, the assessment still stands. Kind of like this poor fellow."

"We don't know that he was alone here," the Doctor offered. "Maybe there was a Mrs. Researcher."

"I hope."

They explored room after room, and found basically the same story in each one. Except, way at the other end of the hall, finally, they found a bedroom that had been used as a bedroom. It wasn't the biggest room in the place by any means, but it had a good-sized double bed in it. It was the only one of five bedrooms and a large linen closet that was not stuffed to the gills with trinkets, parts, tools and things that made other things work or explode. In fact, like the living room, it was minimalist in its décor. One bed, no headboard, with an old yellow flowered bedspread, two night stands, a hat rack and a wardrobe. Beyond the wardrobe was a little loo with a shower and toilet and sink.

"Well, he had a bed for two," the Doctor shrugged, striding into the room. "At the very least, he was optimistic."

She chuckled at that, as well. "But look, no clock on the night stand, no book, no specs, no indication that anyone ever really slept here. Just…" she trailed off, looking dispairingly at the place.

The Doctor opened the wardrobe. "Men's clothes. Nary a feminine garment to be found."

"Aww," Martha said. "Poor guy."

"Martha," he laughed. "We know nothing about him! Maybe he was a horror to live with! Maybe he kept women in every port or planet in the galaxy! Maybe he was a ladies' man who couldn't settle down with just one!"

She put her hand on her hip. "Don't you think that's sad?"

"Whatever," he shrugged. "Anyway, I guess we'll stay in this room, unless we find a better offer in the cellar."

She nodded, then followed him out of the room, past the bursting bedrooms, and down the stairs. Martha had seen the cellar door in the kitchen, so she led the way. Except, when it came to actually descending the wooden stairs, the Doctor wanted to go first. They flipped on the lights both in the stairwell and in the cellar itself, and a bright, fluorescent light came from below.

"Whoa," she said. "Didn't expect that!"

As the Doctor got to the last three steps, he crouched down and peered into the cellar. What he saw was totally incongruous with the rest of the house. It was a state-of-the-art facility, sterile, white walls, computers, stainless steel examination tables, microscopes, specimen jars…

"Well, Martha, we've found the Researcher's lab," he said.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. And someone was _years_ ahead of his time here. This is state-of-the-art for the year 2500 or so."

He took the last steps and walked lightly into the lab. He kept his hands in his pockets, and strolled through, looking, assessing.

"Oh, boy," the Doctor sighed after a minute.

"What?"

"Look."

She looked past him. Slumped over a computer desk, surrounded by notes and test tubes and books, was a skeleton dressed in a lab coat.

"Oh, boy," Martha repeated.


	5. Chapter 5

**After a few chapters of running and revelations, this one may seem a tad low-key. But if you have been reading my stories, you know at least one direction in which this one will probably go, so some work has to be done in the touchy-feely arena! Also, some other questions and concepts get raised here that will come into play later.**

* * *

><p><span>FIVE<span>

Trying to add a touch of normalcy to her brain, Martha stood in C.J. Ephraim's tiny bathroom and brushed her teeth, trying not to think about the body in the basement.

"Look what I found," said the Doctor, poking his head in. "Sorry."

She spat toothpaste into the sink. "'Sokay. Did you find a lamp?"

"Sort of," he said. He held up a kerosene-fuelled lantern that he had found in one of Ephraim's pack-rat rooms. "I'm sure there are others somewhere, but I got tired of looking after I'd been tunnelling for forty-five minutes. Maybe we can go spelunking again tomorrow night."

"Okay," she said, filling her cupped hand with water, and rinsing her mouth.

The Doctor wandered over to the bedside and lit the lamp, setting it down on the nightstand. After the sun had set upon this singular, moonless, planet, they noticed that the bedroom they were planning on sleeping in didn't have any light of its own. No lightbulb in the overhead fixture, and enough cobwebs to indicate that there hadn't been one for years, and no lamps. They assumed, and discussed, that Ephraim probably dragged himself routinely up to the room after so many hours of work, that he undressed in the dark and fell into bed without needing or wanting any light, and had never realised how pitch black it was.

Martha shut the door to the bathroom and changed into the pyjamas she'd brought with her. Well, not so much pyjamas as a pair of worn-in orange terrycloth gym shorts and a white camisole tank top. But, when she walked back out of the bathroom and saw him sitting there in the firelight, and he smiled at her, she got a shiver. Nervousness. Awkwardness. In all the mystery and excitement, it hadn't occurred to her until _just now_ that she'd actually be sharing a bed with the Doctor. Probably in the long-term. Sure, there was Dolly Bailey's inn in 1599, but they had both lain above the covers, once, for no more than two hours before they were interrupted by screams.

Here, they were likely in it for the long-haul. There would be much more time for her to lie in the dark next to him and torture herself, and there was no one in the world to interrupt them – possibly literally. She sighed, feeling exhausted at the thought of living this way, but equally daunted and sad for the man who used to occupy this room.

The Doctor stood up and took off his jacket, then began pulling at his tie. As he folded the garments and set them on the floor, Martha bent and ran her hands over the light green sheets, which she had found in brand-new packaging in the trinket shed that passed for a linen closet. She got into bed and sat with her legs covered, setting her mobile phone's alarm for eight hours hence. Her brow was furrowed, a phenomenon not lost on the Doctor.

"You okay?" he asked.

His voice surprised her again. She hadn't realised she'd been so deep in thought. When she looked up, he was bare from the waist-up, billowing out his shirt so he could wear it tomorrow. It was a nice sight to her, but she didn't feel a rush of heat like she normally would. He walked over and hung the shirt on the knob of the wardrobe. She stared, assessing her feelings, momentarily unaware that she was supposed to respond.

Finally, she said flatly, "Y-yeah. I'm fine." Mechanically, she lay down, straight back, and stared at the ceiling with her hands folded on her stomach.

"Oh, enormously convincing," he said, unbuttoning his trousers. "Why you've never won the Oscar is beyond me."

"I'm fine," she repeated, unmoving.

"Okay," he said. "If you like."

He folded his trousers over his arm and laid them neatly on the floor next his folded jacket and tie. He pulled back his side of the covers and got into bed next to her. He turned on his side and put his head in his hand so he could look at her.

She turned her head and asked, "Where are Howard's Pyjamas?"

"I'm travelling light," he shrugged.

"I just assumed your rucksack would have infinite space inside, like the TARDIS."

"No. But an excellent idea. That will be my next project, as soon as we're finished here."

She smiled. Again, she noticed the firelight.

She was in bed with the Doctor, and there was firelight, like a candle casting dancing shadows on the wall.

But she was a bit preoccupied by something else. How the hell did it come to this? Her heart was not fluttering with anticipation, nor her stomach tied in knots for knowing that her heart was misguided.

"Seriously, what's wrong?" he asked. "I mean, it can' t be the dead body, you've dissected cadavers. It's something else."

"It's not the body itself," she said. "It's how he died."

"Oh," the Doctor said low. "I see."

"In the thrall of a terrible plague, so sick he probably couldn't think straight anymore, he was still trying to help," she said to him, tears coming to her eyes. This was exactly the scene she'd wanted to avoid, but it felt good to let it come out. "And he expired over his research, literally dropped dead _on his papers_, having spent his very last moments of life all alone, trying to find a cure or an antidote or whatever. It's... beautiful and sad. But mostly sad."

"But also beautiful," he agreed with her, trying to help her see the bright side.

Tears then escaped and rolled sideways away from her eyes onto the pillow. The Doctor reached out and wiped them away with his free hand.

_Now_ she felt the flutter.

"Well," he said to her softly. "It will be through his sacrifice that we save Lincomb and his people, and who knows how many other colonies and cities and planets in the path of this thing."

She searched his face, his eyebrows now furrowed in sympathy with her. "But did he have to die? Couldn't we have got here earlier?" Her voice was cracking and more tears were coming.

"That occurred to me too," he said. "But the TARDIS brought us _here_. Maybe it's because she's a thousand years old and a bit wonky at times, but it might very well have been for a good reason. Maybe if we'd come earlier, we'd be in much greater danger of catching the plague. In fact, that's a pretty good scenario, if I do say so myself."

"I don't like it," she said, shutting her eyes tight, embarrassed that she now could not stop the tears.

He took the hand supporting his head and cupped his forearm around her head. He leaned over and pressed his lips to her temple, just at the corner of her eye and eyebrow. He kissed her softly, and the flutter came again.

"I don't either," he whispered in her ear, touching his other hand to her bare shoulder. He stroked her comfortingly. He rested his forehead lightly against hers, and said, "But this is where we landed, and this is what we do. We walk into a bad situation, and try to make the best of it."

"So," she sniffed. "When life gives you a skeleton in the basement..."

"You make lemonade, yeah."

She chuckled a little, in spite of herself. "Okay." She dried her eyes.

The Doctor pulled his head away from her, and looked down. "Have you finished crying?"

"No," she said, falling again into small fits of tears.

He got closer to her and rested his head on his arm, just above her head. His other hand stroked her arm. Every now and then, he wiped her tears or kissed her forehead.

The grief she was feeling for the lot of C.J. Ephraim was fierce, but so was the heat of the Doctor's body pressed against her. She could _feel_ skin, chest hair, the up-and-down of his breathing. And with the positioning of their bodies, if she moved her left hand half an inch sideways, she was fairly certain it would either kill the moment or cause their relationship to skyrocket to a whole new level. It was amazing and wonderful and terrifying all wrapped up in one. But she felt comforted by her friend's gesture, the closeness, the sympathy. In spite of his having seen every kind of death imaginable, a thousand times each, all across the universe, he was willing to hold her while she cried for this one lonely researcher.

* * *

><p>The smell of coffee woke Martha. She didn't open her eyes at first, she simply inhaled luxuriously and let the beautiful aroma do its work.<p>

She heard a strange noise. It was like beads sliding on a wood floor.

"Hunh?" she said, sitting upright, her eyes bolting open.

"What's wrong?" the Doctor asked, his hands still on the curtains he had just pushed open. He was fully dressed once again, head to toe in brown pinstripes and hair in its usual careful disarray.

"Oh. Nothing. Just didn't recognise that sound," she said, her voice still scratchy with slumber. She yawned rubbed her eyes against the shocking light of day now pouring into Ephraim's stark bedroom.

She looked at the other side of the bed, where, last she looked, the Doctor had lain in his underwear. "You made your side of the bed?" Then an unpleasant thought occurred to her. "Did you... erm, you know, sleep somewhere else?"

"No, I slept right beside you," he answered looking at her with puzzlement. "It's just that I was awake two hours ago and..." he giggled and rocked back on his heels.

"What?" she asked, smiling back at him.

"I got antsy to go down into the cellar and start work. So I made the bed. Took a shower with the door open and sang a couple of arias, brushed my teeth loudly, got dressed, rooted around in the rubbish heap in the next room... I was like a bull in a china shop! I had no idea you were such a sound sleeper!"

She laughed. "Well, yeah. I could have told you that. Wait, why didn't you just go down there, into the cellar?"

"I wasn't going to begin the first day's research without you," he shrugged. "Incidentally, did you know that you snore a little?"

"Yes," she admitted, blushing sheepishly. "It's why my sister eventually got her own room. Just shake me awake next time, and I'll go to the sofa."

"No, no," he insisted. "It's cute."

"Cute?"

"Yeah. It's like listening to a bear cub snore."

She stared at him for a few moments with her mouth open, then laughed. "Okay! If you say so."

"You'll have to report on me, one of these days. No idea if I snore or not. Never had anyone in a position to tell me, not with _this _set of sinuses," he told her, pointing to his face.

"Really?"

"Yeah, really. Why would I lie? Anyway, knowing you these past several months and having seen your habits, I finally came up with the perfect thing to get you up and running without having to poke you with a stick," he told her, gesturing toward a chair he had placed beside the bed. On it was a tray with two cups of coffee and some sugar. "And I was right. Sorry – there was cream, but it was... well, we'll just say expired. Any other accurate adjective would just disgust you unduly."

"Ah, coffee," she sighed, having forgotten about the aroma that had awakened her. She reached for a cup. "You do know me well. But I did set my alarm."

"Yeah, it went off an hour ago, and you missed it," he said, sitting down on the bed facing her, and taking his own cup. "You must have been knackered."

"I guess I was. Rough day." She took a sip. "Good coffee. Why does it smell like pepper?"

"It's chicory," he told her, taking his own sip.

"It's nice."

"Mm. How are you feeling today?"

Martha thought about what was waiting for them in the cellar. "A little apprehensive. I mean, what are we going to find in those papers? His last bits of research, his very last thoughts, Doctor. The last things that went through his mind as he died alone in a basement are likely in those documents."

"Yes. He was determined that we, the universe, should know everything he knows. He probably anticipated that someone would come looking for him, then try and finish up his research."

Martha nodded sadly. "Someone ought to. Be seeking him out, that is."

"Martha," he said, putting down his coffee cup, taking her hand. "Please try not to get yourself down every time you think about him. If you do, we'll never be able to finish what he started. Look around this house. Every bedroom is filled with rubbish except this one, and his office, and there is absolutely no evidence that anyone else lived here, especially a female. I suppose it's possible that he just didn't swing that way, but by most logical accounts, it really appears that he lived in this great big house for a good long time, on his own. He made his choice long before the plague hit."

"How do you know he made his choice?" she asked, grudgingly, like a child, barely moving her lips. "Maybe he got left at the altar, or lost his family in a fire..."

As soon as she said it, she regretted it. Saying something like that to a man who had lost his family in a fire was totally insensitive, and not like her.

"I know, because I make _my_ choice every day," he said softly, after a pause. He was grave, but not annoyed.

"Yeah?"

"I'm all on my own in the universe, and yet I'm not."

"Because the Face of Boe said?"

"No, it's nothing to do with that, with the possibility of other Time Lords out there. It's because I seek out companionship. Sometimes I don't even know I'm doing it. You've probably noticed that I definitely have more than a few anti-social tendencies, but when it comes down to it, I'd rather be... well, with you. So I make the effort."

"With me?"

"I'm just saying, if I can pick up strays all over the place, then so can our friend, C.J."

Martha smiled. He was quoting her, by calling his travelling companions _strays_. She gazed at him. She knew she must look like an idiot staring into his eyes like that, and more than an idiot, she must look lovesick. But momentarily, she decided not to care, and allowed herself this little indulgence.

It occurred to her in this reverie that C.J. Ephraim might not have had the Doctor's unique gifts. Namely, the sympathetic brown eyes, luxurious hair, chiselled face and supple mouth. Nor, probably, the charm. She knew that Ephraim must have had a mightily formidable brain, but you can't see _brains _from across the room, which was what made the Doctor such a dangerous specimen. She knew full well that not everyone who spent their life alone did so by choice, but she wasn't about to argue the miserable lot of solitude with a man who was literally the last of his species and travelled in a sentient ship that was the last of _its_ species as well.

"Let's just focus on the good that he did. And a man like that would have been married to his work anyway. It would be all the fulfilment he'd need," the Doctor offered as consolation. "And if not, then let's not let his sacrifice be in vain, eh? In any case, he wouldn't want us to stand around mourning for him or talking about his sad existence. He was a celebrated researcher, so let's celebrate him."

"Okay, fair enough," she said, putting her coffee cup down next to the Doctor's. Then, she threw the covers off and stood up. "But you'll have to be patient with me. I can't help that I'm still a little angry with the TARDIS for bringing us here too late."

"All right, if you need to be angry, be angry. But maybe we'll discover a reason _why_."

"Maybe."


	6. Chapter 6

SIX

The lights came on in the spacious basement, and the lab coat-clad corpse was right where they had left it. Martha swallowed the sadness that welled up inside, and began to approach it, as the Doctor began casting his eyes over the equipment.

The previous evening, they had only seen the body from a distance. Today, Martha could see that there was actually quite a bit of flesh still on the body. It was emaciated and dry like jerky, but it was flesh, which could yield more about a virus than bone.

She reached into a large box on her right and pulled from it a pair of green latex gloves, sized for a man with large hands. But they were better than nothing. She lifted the head carefully, wincing as she listened to the dried skin creak. Pieces of paper had stuck to the face as the flesh had decomposed, then dried. She gently removed the documents from the cheek, then gathered them up from the area and made a pile, with the damaged ones on top. Blood and lipids and the ugly fluids of ravaging death had leeched into the fibres and rendered the writing difficult to read, but she could make out the beginnings and some ends and middles of equations, and some diagrams of what appeared to be mutated cells. And she reckoned the Doctor's discerning eye could take up the rest.

The Doctor wandered over. "Yikes. What's that?" he asked, indicating the soiled pages.

"This was stuck to the flesh," she told him.

The Doctor pulled rubber gloves from the same box (except they fit him), and he lifted the head as well and felt the area where the cheek had been removed from the paper. He pushed his fingers into the collar of the man's shirt and felt the skin on the neck and shoulders. "I hadn't realised there was so much flesh left. This will be good."

"Yeah. Because judging by the state of that examination table, I'd say that he never had an organic specimen to work with, that wasn't a microbe."

The Doctor noticed the exam table for the first time. Stainless steel and relatively new, but covered with boxes and crates and other assortments of stackable things.

"You're right. I'd say the first step is to clear that table, Martha," the Doctor said.

"Good idea," she said, moving toward it. She took a box in her arms. "Whoa, heavier than I thought. Give me a hand?"

"I will in a few minutes. Meantime, I'll be in the laundry room."

"Yes, the cleanliness of your clothes was my first thought, too." She frowned. She watched him go, a little irritated.

But she began to clear the exam table, as best she could, without injuring herself. She started stacking everything against a miraculously blank wall toward the very back of the lab, and within two minutes, the Doctor was back, and he was carrying a large blue plastic jug in his hands.

"What's that?" she asked.

"Fabric softener," the Doctor answered, reaching into a nearby drawer and coming up with a pair of surgical shears. He began cutting the clothes off the body.

"Because his lab coat has static cling?" asked Martha.

"No, because his joints will break and skin will disintegrate if we try to move him."

As Martha moved boxes, the Doctor removed the clothes. Then he put them aside as specimens for later examination. Martha did as much moving as she could, and the two of them searched for rags or towels. They found large, beach-sized towels in one of the upstairs pack rat rooms, and the Doctor cut thin strips like bandages and instructed her to soak them in the fabric softener. Then, they wrapped the hips, knees, elbows, neck, shoulders and fingertips in the soaked bandages, and waited.

Meanwhile, he helped her move the last, heaviest boxes from the exam table. Then they spent the next hour or so arranging instruments and equipment the way they wanted it.

At last, it was time to move the body from his position at the desk to the examination table, where hopefully, his sacrifice could be justified and his work could be finished. The Doctor had gone upstairs to try and find something, anything, to make the transport a bit easier. A trolley, a board and a bicycle, anything.

And Martha, out of curiosity, began to poke around in the boxes she had just moved. The heavy ones contained books and notebooks. Volume after volume of spiral-bound pages emerged from the dusty cardboard crates, and Martha chuckled at how even in 2065, some people were still writing stuff by hand and filing it away in dusty old boxes in the basement.

She pulled a medium-sized notebook and began to leaf through it. Much of it was familiar medical jargon, though some of it seemed to be written in a strange code of symbols, totally separate from the Greek system and the shorthand that some of her colleagues and instructors had used. Interesting, she thought, that the written language of medicine would change so much in the next fifty or sixty years. Then again, this was a different planet...

And then she came across something truly intriguing.

The Doctor reached the bottom of the stairs at that point, and said, "What did you find?"

"Listen to this," she said, and began to read from the notebook. _"As I have tried to convey, I have a unique sense of my surroundings, and even as a child, I understood many, many things that men and women, much my seniors, did not. But my father's instructions concerning what he called 'The TFP Project' were not among them. He had given me tools and information that made little or no sense to me, and my mother, who was usually instrumental in filling in gaps left by my father's absent-minded ravings, continually told me to be patient. I was not accustomed to being dismissed nor baffled by this sort of thing; his cryptic messages and her placating remarks were frustrating to me beyond measure, such that I did not have the personal coping mechanism to handle then, at the age of thirteen. After that, of course, my aunt and uncle could not be of help, and my life..."_

"What?" he asked, wanting more. "His life...?"

"That's it. It stops. The next several pages are just more research stuff and math and notes. No more narrative... unless it picks up somewhere else in the book, which I'm sure it does..."

"Interesting."

"Yeah! He was working on a memoir!"

"So it would seem."

"Oh, I wonder what other little gems are hiding away in this box! And what's the TFP Project?"

"I don't know," he said. "I suppose we'll find out if we keep digging, eh? But for now, I need your help."

"Sure. Did you find anything to wheel him over?"

"No, so we have to be extra careful," the Doctor told her. "Let's undo the bandages."

They very slowly unwound the pieces of soaked towel from the select areas of the body. Then the Doctor said, "All right, let' s move him. Please lean the chair back."

Martha carefully pushed her foot against one of the legs in the back of the chair, and tipped it back toward her. The corpse was now in a grotesque, contorted position, his head and arms unnaturally upward, and his knees and feet the same. Martha noted how light a grown man could be, once all the moisture had decomposed away from the body.

The Doctor knelt slowly, and eased one arm under the neck. Then he eased the other arm under the knees. He took a moment to steady himself, then whispered, "Here goes nothing."

He stood carefully, cradling like a baby the dried-up remains of a fully-grown man. The head, its neck lubricated by the fabric softener, hung straight back, and Martha felt it was in danger of snapping off, so she moved it gingerly to rest against the Doctor's chest. He looked at her sadly and sighed. She tried to smile sympathetically, as she could see that the sadness she'd been feeling was finally catching up with the Doctor. Carrying in his arms such a pervasive and clever man, once, apparently a precocious child with a mother and a father and an uncle and an aunt, reduced to fifty pounds of dried skin and bones, was not, she could tell, his idea of great adventure. He looked down sadly at the dead form, and she marvelled at the compassion in his eyes, the care that he took.

The Doctor moved slowly toward the exam table and began to set the body down, starting with the backside. Martha took the head, once again, in her hands and laid it down carefully, the fabric softener easing the unfolding of the dried-up joints. His neck and shoulders were malleable enough, and the Doctor used one free arm to arrange the body's arms by its sides. Martha moved toward the feet, and gently manoeuvred the knees straight, and helped the Doctor unfold the hips, and thereby flatten the back.

They had managed, with the help of a simple household chemical, to transport the body eight full feet, without losing any parts at all. The Doctor took a measuring tape, which they had found earlier and placed conveniently near, and measured the body from toe to crown.

"One hundred eighty-five centimetres, and some change," he said.

"So, six-foot-one, or so."

"Yep. Same as me, give or take," he commented. "Rather pointless to try and weigh him... I suppose we should, before we do anything else, try to verify that these are the remains of C.J. Ephraim. Just to be sure."

"Really?"

"Well, yes. You're a woman of science, Martha, you know," he said, moving round back to the desk. He opened a file drawer. "It's very, very likely this is him, but just because _this_ body is in _this_ basement does not make him the owner of this house. Correlation, causation... something like that."

"What are you doing?"

"Most folks, round this time, were keeping hard copies of their DNA profiles with their personal information in files and stuff. After stem-cell research took off, the DNA thing became important as an emergency precaution, like you lot wear medic alert bracelets. And after the internet mole scare of 2021... well, people started going back to hard-copies of certain things. You know, swing of the pendulum."

"Great. How do we test him?"

"Do you see that thing-a-ma-bob over there? The one with the little red lip that comes out?"

"Yes."

"Bring that on over here, and let's hope it works." He continued to rifle through the drawer, until he said, "Ah-ha! Success!"

He whipped a purple document envelope out of the drawer, then kicked the drawer shut. He pulled a glossy piece of card stock from inside and examined it while Martha crossed the room carrying a small white thing over from the shelf. It was about the size of a mobile phone, and had a shiny black screen on the front. She found a power button and a little red light came on at the top. After a five-second delay, a green light came on, and the screen came to life. A welcome message popped up, and a menu. Martha assumed that "DNA profile" was the correct application, so she touched the little double-helix icon. Then it said, "Input," and she handed it to the Doctor.

There were two little dots at the bottom of the screen. The Doctor touched his finger to the two dots and then swept it to the left, and the touch screen advanced to a new menu. The new menu said, "Fluid, fibre, other." The Doctor touched "fibre," and two more dots appeared at the bottom. He scrolled sideways again, and the third menu said, "Hair, bone, skin, other." He touched "hair." The screen said "Ready," and the red lip opened at the bottom, a little bit like a very tiny CD player tray.

The Doctor cut one strand of straggly, dry hair from the dead man's head and placed it inside the lip. It sensed the fibre inside, and closed on its own.

"That's wicked," Martha commented. "It's like iPod meets _CSI_ meets _The Jetsons._"

"Yep. And it should only take fifteen seconds. It will give us sex, race, age, congenital defects, and some other stuff. Then it will scan this printout of Ephraim's DNA profile for a match and then we'll know..."

The device interrupted the Doctor by beeping loudly and throwing an "Error" message onto the touch screen.

"What?" asked the Doctor. "What's the problem?"

He repeated the process, except he used a piece of skin this time, and the same thing happened."

"Blimey," he said. "Martha, give me one of your hairs."

She obliged, and he tried the DNA test on Martha Jones.

Within seconds, the screen came alive with info, including a graph, throwing off Martha's DNA profile. "Female, negroid, 21-25 years, no congenital defect. AB blood group. Blood alcohol .0000."

"Well, you're not drunk, that's good to know," the Doctor said to her. "What's not good is that it's the specimen, not the device, causing the problem."

He reset the screen to "Input," and repeated the process with one of his own hairs. The "Error" message came up.

He pulled the sonic screwdriver from his pocket and used it to snap off the back panel of the device. "Mm," he muttered. "Made by Disney/Apple. No wonder."

"Disney/Apple? Seriously?"

"Yeah. And they never got very off-worldy, so that means this thing was made on Earth and calibrated for humans. That's weird. I didn't think he'd be from Earth. Like I said, by now humans have colonised Mars, but..."

"But this guy isn't human."

"No. Well, not fully, anyway. What's he doing with something made by Disney/Apple? Wait, what if I..." and then he took the sonic once more and aimed at the innards of the device. "There now." He replaced the back panel, and gave it one more go, with the hair of the dead man.

"What did you do?" Martha asked while they waited.

"I fixed it so the thing would isolate his human aspect, if he has one, and give us only that information."

And it did. "Male, negroid, 55-59 years, congenital cardiac anomaly of unknown origin, pulmonary anomaly of unknown origin. Blood group undetectable. Blood alcohol undetectable."

"Well yeah," the Doctor muttered at the machine. "When you have no blood, it's hard for the machine to test it, isn't it?"

"Okay, so he's at least partly human, and his human element is black?" she asked.

"Looks like."

"Hm. Okay. What does that tell us?"

"Nothing much, except gives us a better idea what he might have looked like. But _this_ will tell us much."

He poked the touch screen a few times, and a bright white LED-like light emerged from a little hole at the bottom of the device. The Doctor laid Ephraim's DNA profile on the table and scanned it with the bright light, then he hit a button, and waited.

"It's a match," he said after a few seconds. "These are Ephraim's remains. Well, at least now we know for sure."

"Sorry, C.J.," Martha sighed. "I had hope there for a while."


	7. Chapter 7

SEVEN

As the sun set on the deserted city, Martha sat in the little kitchen and leafed through one of the notebooks she'd found. After an absence of less than thirty minutes, the Doctor stumbled in through the front door with four loaded-up canvas bags.

"Where did you go?" she asked, coming through to help him with one of the bags.

"Next door," he said, kicking the door shut behind him. "Might as well. No-one home anyway, and the non-perishables are perfectly good. We'll just have to learn to do without milk and bread for a while."

"Did you find any other... remains?"

"No," he said. "But I didn't exactly go searching. It's possible they all went underground thinking they'd be safe. Or something. I guess I'd prefer not to think too hard about it if I don't have to."

He delved into the deep reaches of the kitchen cupboards for a saucepan, and within a few minutes, Martha could smell beans cooking on the stove.

"Smells like home," she said with a smile.

"Yep," he agreed. "A helping of home, served with your choice of canned carrots or canned whilabis."

"Excuse me?"

"Whilabis grows in this galaxy only," he said. "It's a bit like a water chestnut, but it's star-shaped and salty."

She shrugged. "Whatever. I'll try it."

He emptied the whilabis discs onto a little plate. He brought it to the table, along with two bowls and a couple of spoons. Martha moved her reading material out of the way as the Doctor poured some beans into her bowl.

"Thanks. Do you want to hear something incredibly sad?" she asked, referring to Ephraim's book sitting beside her bowl.

"Boy, do I ever!" he exclaimed, sitting down across from her.

"_I was middle-aged already when I arrived on this planet. My feel for the workings of the universe had made me a little claustrophobic. Especially after my parents were gone. Without them, I was alone with my lot, with no power to fix anything. So I retreated to a place where I could continue my studies and disappear. I keep my head down in my basement lab, trying not to see the great Mandala of existence, trying not to see the burn..._"

Martha squinted.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"It's obscured here. Smeared. I can't tell what it says. Anyway, it picks up a line or two later... _But it appears now that I have succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. I have kept my attention so well-focused on my life in this city of Fontana, I have no idea what the rest of the planet is doing, or whether the sickness has claimed it. I suspect it has, since history tells us the virus has been carried from planet to planet. All I know for certain is that my existence now is more solitary than it has ever been. Solitude has never made me feel lonely, until now. _

_"The city stopped having funerals over a month ago, mostly because the last clergyman perished. The rest of the population went shortly thereafter, losing all hope, in spite of my best efforts to give them a bit of buoyancy. I am the last one left alive in this city, and now I understand a bit more of what..."_

Martha stopped and squinted again.

"Another smear?" the Doctor asked.

"Yeah. I wonder if it's tears."

"That's a lovely thought."

"_But I cannot give up. I am The Researcher, I am, as yet, perfectly healthy as a result of my unique genetic makeup, and my studies in this, my father's TFP project..._ Oh! The TFP project! It's the work he was doing on the virus. So his father started the research!"

"Looks like," the Doctor said, spooning beans into his mouth.

"_... my studies in this, my father's TFP project have taken me further than anyone else in the known universe who has ventured to study this disease. I will persevere to erradicate this killer, I will..."_

"Again?" asked the Doctor.

"No smear," Martha said. "This time it just stops."

"Did he say he was perfectly healthy after everyone else had died?" he asked.

"Yeah."

"So, the virus mutates," he said. "And he was susceptible only to a much later mutation. We know he was of mixed lineage... that tends to complicate things. For us, anyway. Worked all right for him."

"Yeah, if want to call being all alone in the world something that_ works out all right_."

The Doctor got a little pang.

Martha continued, "But that means... studying what killed Ephraim won't necessarily help us work out how to save Lincomb, or anyone else."

"Perhaps not specifically, but we can follow the pattern of mutation backwards, and most likely, Ephraim will have samples of multiple mutations in petrie dishes somewhere, we just have to find them." The Doctor sighed big, and rested his chin on his hand. "The last one left alive in the whole city, and probably the whole planet. What a thing to have to go through."

"What about you?" she asked him softly.

He smiled weakly. "Bit different," he said. "And I'll tell you something else! What was that about the Mandala of existence?"

"Yeah, that was interesting," she told him. "He says he has a deeper understanding of how the universe works. That's the second time it's come up."

"Not how the universe works," the Doctor muttered. "The workings of the universe. There's a difference."

"There is?"

"Oh, yes," he said to Martha, and then he seemed to drift. "The Mandala of existence... like a wheel, interconnecting colours, all meaningful, all..." He trailed off and was silent, staring into his beans.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah," he assured her, not very assuredly. "It's just... this is big, Martha. This thing we've discovered. This guy, this Ephraim... whatever this is, it's big. He's important. There's something... there's something. I can feel it."

"Well, we knew he was important," Martha said. "We just didn't know his name."

"I mean, something more than just _he's a great scientist_," the Doctor protested. "There's something..."

"There's something?" she asked. "You keep saying that, but you aren't finishing your thought."

"Something more to be discovered, something we need to know... something we're missing. But, argh! No, no, it's more than that. It's just... I can't explain it, Martha. But there's something about this guy, I know it."

* * *

><p>The bedroom was still. Two of the three moons could be seen through the window. It was the most peaceful planet in the galaxy, and yet, there were no deep sighs of slumber nor bear-cub snores.<p>

"Why aren't you sleeping?" Martha asked.

"My mind won't quiet down. Thinking about stuff."

"Like what?"

"Mandala."

"Ah. I'm not sure what to do with that. It's interesting."

"No, it's not. It's what I always see when I close my eyes."

"Really?"

"Pretty much. Gets tiring."

"What would you rather see?" she asked.

"It's all right to see, but in smaller doses. Trees, grass, people smiling..." he paused, then sighed.

"If it's any consolation, Doctor, that's not what I see when I close my eyes either. I don't see the Mandala of existence exactly, but I think everyone wishes that things could be less complicated than they are."

"Yeah? What sorts of complicated things do you see when you close your eyes?" he asked.

What a dangerous question. She almost let the truth slip out. One word, with one syllable, whispered right now could change everything. Not even a word. All she had to do was utter the twenty-first letter of the alphabet, and their world would turn upside-down. For the better or for the worse, she did not know. But sleepy, and not sleeping, dark, but not isolated, going to bed together but not being intimate: now would be the perfect time to see how things would go if she confessed what she actually sees when she closes her eyes. But... oh, but...

"What I see is beautiful. It's how I feel about it that's complicated," she answered

"I suppose that's me too," he said. "I suppose that's what makes complicated things complicated. Things are simple until we start _thinking_ and _feeling_."

"Hm. It's interesting. We talked about this a lot in my Sociology class at uni the first year."

"What?"

"This is what Sociology's all about. What you just said. Things are only complicated because we _make_ them complicated. Things exist independent of one another, independent of us. We give them significance, and that's what dictates how we act toward them, and how things become interconnected with one another. Like... the cross. It's just two lines that intersect, right? But to a Christian, because a piece of wood that shape is heavily involved in a story that lies at the heart of their faith, it has meaning. It represents their faith as a whole. But if an alien landed on Earth..."

"Oi, careful!"

"Let me finish! If an alien landed on Earth _having no prior knowledge of humankind_, then it would just be two lines that intersect. And that alien would be confused as to why there are wars fought over it, and it hangs in homes and around people's necks, until they are told the story, and can attach meaning."

"I suppose you're right."

"Sorry, this probably all seems all very touchy-feely to you, a man of science... which is, in itself, not exactly true, is it? But... I thought I was a woman of science through and through, no crap psychology, until I took that class. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would."

"That's because it's not crap psychology," the Doctor told her.

"I know. I was just lying here wondering about your view of the world versus mine. Could I _ever_ see what you see,_ the way _you see it? Or vice versa?"

"Via Sociology," the Doctor said. He was smiling in a way that would have made Martha angry if she could see him "That's _one way_ of asking that question."

"If I could see the Mandala of existence, like you say," she suggested. "Maybe it wouldn't be as complex for me. I wouldn't know what the hell I was looking at."

"But it's only through its meaning that it can be seen at all," he said. "It's not a literal thing that you can just look into a telescope and see. It's a whole bunch of... strings and threads and knots of time, space, and thought, and some liquid variables that soak through everything for good measure. Time and space and thought are intangible, so the Mandala is intangible as well, yeah? They overlap, they connect, they shift and shimmy, and only by knowing all of that can anyone _see_ – if it's really seeing – the shape of it or get any perspective over it. Not the other way round."

She chuckled. "So, you're telling me that time and space exist outside of sociology."

"Er, okay. If you like," he conceded, chuckling back. "But I would posit that time and space exist _around_ the concept of sociology. How do you like that?"

"I like it!"

"What's with you, getting all existential on me? Do you always have these thoughts lying in bed in the dark?"

Another dangerous question.

"I told you. My feelings are complicated."

"Yeah, I know."

"Do you?" she asked. She was certain that he didn't. Even if he had an inkling, there was no way he could know exactly.

"Yeah. And I'd give anything to switch with you for just one night."

"Are you saying I'm simple?"

"No, just different. There were only a handful of us to begin with who could see the Mandala, as we've been calling it. And I'm not going to lie: it's a lot to handle. And now they're gone – no one is left, and I have to carry that burden alone. I can travel with an army in the TARDIS, and I'll still be completely alone in that regard. I was just thinking, it might be nice to let go of that, and take on some of _your_ angst for a while. I'm sure it's formidable, but it's different from mine."

She sighed. _You couldn't handle my angst; __**you are**__ my angst_, she wanted to say.

"I wish there was a way," she said. "I think of us as partners, and I think that we should be able to share that with each other, share the burden of the things that make us tick, or make us miserable or whatever."

And she wasn't just saying it because if he could see her burden, he would know how to fix it, and maybe, just maybe, they could have a wonderful, beautiful epiphany of mutual affection...

She was saying it because she loved him, and she genuinely wished she could share more with him, and take away some of his pain.

"Well, it's just biology, Martha. It's like a river trout wishing he could do the things an osprey can do, or the other way round. It's not that he's not just as good as an osprey, with his fins, but the fact remains, he doesn't have wings or lungs, so that limits his ability to fly. And by the same token, the osprey would get bogged down and drown if he tried to live too long in the trout's world. Although..."

He was silent for a few moments. "Although what?"

"Actually, there is a way. Humans have become... shall we say, _privy,_ to that sort of perspective before."

"Really?"

"Well, yes. But it's painful and dangerous... and really not a very likely thing to have happen."

"Not that I'm saying I want to sign up for the program, but... how would that even work?" she wanted to know. "Seriously – just asking."

"Something called a _metacrisis_ has to happen. It requires an energy transfer of some kind, from Time Lord to human, and usually there's a proxy for the energy to get used, or escape."

"What does that mean?"

"Like when you make a pie. Pastry, apples, pan... after you do your thing and put it all together, you're left with just enough for a little tart, so that the materials don't go to waste."

"I see. Two elements come together..."

"And trust me, it causes problems. And apart from that, once the Time Lord consciousness takes up residence in the human, then..."

"I take it that's the dangerous part."

"Yep. The human can see the universe like we do, for a little while, but it's hard on them – burns them slowly, after a fashion. Some types of metacrises are temporary... especially one type. Has happened quite a few times, it's a..." He seemed to stop, then he cleared his throat. "Well, it's a sort of fusion of cells. And in that case, you wait for it to run its course. Other types of metacrisis are permanent, but those usually kill the host, so..."

"Oh."

"Yeah. I mean, don't get me wrong, there's a way to prevent the death, but it usually means stripping the human mind a lot cleaner than one would like."

"Is there a way for you to get into my mind?" she asked.

"You want me in there?"

She sighed. What was with him and the horrible questions tonight?

"No, again," she told him. "I'm just curious."

"Yes there is. But don't worry. I can't do it without you knowing about it."


	8. Chapter 8

**I am delighted that so many of you have said privately and publicly that you think you know what's going on with CJ Ephraim! I have been planting clues, indeed! And I have to say that I do very much appreciate your continuing NOT to blurt out what you think you know, so that all the world can see it in a review! Please help keep those in the dark who are still enjoying the mystery!**

**And one more thing: Ephraim's journal entry... I'm not that happy with it. I would have liked more emotion, but I just couldn't get it right! Wanted that to be said.**

* * *

><p><span>EIGHT<span>

The Doctor aimed the sonic screwdriver at a wall. It was a spare bit of wall, the only spare bit of wall, in the entirety of C.J. Ephraim's lab. They heard a click. He approached the wall and pushed. It gave way. The Doctor looked at Martha and fluttered his eyebrows at her.

He walked inside and turned on the lights, then called out, "Ha! _Molto bene!_ Am I good, or what?"

Martha peeked inside. "This is mad! How did you even know that door was there?" she asked.

He shrugged. "Just did. It's what I would have done."

"It's what _you_ would have done?"

"Sure. If I was going to put a shedload of petrie dishes of samples of a deadly virus somewhere, it would be someplace where no-one would stumble onto it," he told her. He sauntered round the little room, not touching any of the hundreds of little plastic containers. "Good man, Mr. Ephraim. Don't want any of this falling into the wrong hands."

"I guess he was pretty confident that nobody would walk in here," Martha commented, walking in there. "Nothing is labeled."

"Blimey," the Doctor sighed. "Well… I'll go through the samples and see if anything looks… you know, newish. Why don't you go through the boxes of notes again – you seem to have worked out his system."

"Not really. I'm just starting to wonder if he and I think alike in some ways. Yikes," she said, shuddering as she looked back through the door upon the unfortunate man on the exam table. She hoped she never got _this _involved in her work, involved enough to have to make a sacrifice this great.

"Well, whatever. Just see if you can find anything about how to isolate the strain that killed him – or any other strain for that matter. Maybe we can get a visual?"

She agreed, and dove, almost literally, into the stack of boxes they had moved to the wall. Almost straight away, she found something a bit special. It was underneath two other books, but it caught her eye and she dug in specifically for it. It was as though it had been glowing, whispering, "Martha, read me."

It was royal purple and leather, with a silver spiral binding. The leather was quilted with thick black thread, sewn into the shape of two interlinked hearts, and there were some elaborate, swirly designs adorning the blank space. Martha ran her hand over the smooth cover. This journal was definitely different from the others – it had been treated better, and clearly, the cover had been chosen for a reason. And when she opened it up, she could feel that the pages were a little thicker, and made a better quality, tighter weave than the rest of the journals she'd been reading.

"_Dear Haruka,_" she read aloud.

"What?" called the Doctor from inside the bizarre petrie dish room.

"Nothing. Talking to myself."

From then on, she read silently.

"_Dear Haruka, I saw this book in a bizarre little thrift shop near Prince's Square. It reminded me of those eggplant-coloured jeans you were wearing when we met. Forgive me for looking, but I did notice the heart-shaped cowgirl decals on the back pockets. I waited until I almost couldn't see them anymore before running after and approaching you. I was enjoying the view – so sue me."_

Martha chuckled. "Doctor," she called out. "C.J. had a… girlfriend or something." She felt relieved. She had formed a picture of him living in giant house after giant house, his whole life alone. No companionship, no closeness. Well, thank goodness for Haruka.

The Doctor grunted absently over the electronic hum of the sonic screwdriver. He might have said, "Good," but she wasn't really paying attention.

"_And so, because of something stitched on your arse, purple hearts always make me think of you. But don't worry – I always smile when that happens._

"_A person does not forget the moment when they first spot the love of their life, and in my case, spy the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. I remember also that at some point, just before I lost sight of the purple jeans in a sea of university students, I thought I'd be the biggest prat in the universe if I didn't at least approach and say hello. And so I did. And you smiled. And we talked. Your English wasn't very good at all, but my Japanese is better than average, so we got by._

"_But you were distant. I thought it was normal, after all I was British… sort of. I knew about propriety, thank you very much. But then time went on, and I felt familiar with you, but… well, I thought perhaps it was your Asian heritage that made you reserved, but that wasn't the case, was it? It was something else entirely._

"_I remember feeling really betrayed the day I found out about Luo. I was angry with you because I felt that you'd led me on. But you hadn't. I'd led myself on. And later I was really pissed off that I wasn't him. How irrational is that? I have had experiences that most people could only dream of. I have abilities most people can't even understand. I'm a pretty good-looking guy, I'm tall, I'm well-bred. A lot of people would have killed to be me, and I was angry that I wasn't a skinny Chinese activist with a misguided cause and a death wish._

"_Sorry. That was rather too frank, wasn't it? Especially since Luo eventually got his wish, and, I found, that's what had made you so distant. I was surprised to find that I ached for you, no longer only for the usual reasons. I ached because you ached. I could see the faraway look in your eyes when something triggered your memory of him, and it hurt to live in his shadow, but I also longed to draw it out of you, find out what made you sting so badly, and help you make it better. And I didn't want to do it for self-serving reasons – I wanted to do it because I loved you._

"_I loved you. And I still love you._

"_But hard as I tried, I never learned what things triggered your memories of him; I suppose you kept that close the way I keep memories of you close to me. I never learned how exactly he died, and I never got to comfort you. You'd never let me. I moved toward you, and you'd move away. I'd reach out, and you'd recoil. I'd try to tell you how I felt, and you interrupted me. Because you knew. You knew, and you couldn't face it._

"_And I will never understand what made you invite me home to Japan with you. You didn't love me the way I loved you, and still you wanted me at your side? I could not imagine to what end or for what purpose. Sure, you said it was to help you develop your anti-anaphylaxis vaccine, but you were plenty clever enough to do that on your own. I had my doubts, but could I say no to you?_

"_And sharing a flat was a coup, at least for a while. Watching you work had always been a treat for me. Living with you and seeing your lab work was an even better treat; it was a juxtaposition of images that was, I must admit, tantalising for me. When you were working, sometimes I allowed myself to imagine you out of your lab coat. When you were drinking beer in front of the telly, I got myself all worked up over the mighty brain and pain lurking inside. Seeing you in the morning with your hair all dishevelled and your eyes only half open… seeing you at night, knackered from a day's hard work… seeing you at all. You were beautiful and brilliant. You moved round the lab like a cat. No, like mercury – smooth and shiny and volatile. Explosive. We worked and we drank and we talked and we reminisced. We cried and we fought and we made insane plans._

"_And on occasion, we made love. Although, never with each other. People – lovers – came and went from our lives with little or no ceremony because, my sweet, we were lost in each other. And I will believe that until my dying day. You can turn from me all you like, you can deny if it makes you more comfortable, but you knew it as well as I did – we were perfect together. We could run and jump alongside one another in a way that no-one ever could with either one of us. Not even Luo._

"_Dear God, it's been ten years, and I still can't say his name, or write it or see it, without feeling a frisson of resentment. He has your heart and I don't. A dead guy has something I want and I'd almost dig him up to get at it, if I thought it would do me any damn good._

"_But it wouldn't. In spite of myself, I have come to understand that it is unfair to blame Luo for my problems and that it is entirely possible that you and I would have been down the same road even if he had not come into your life. But he did, and as it stands, he is a roadblock to me, even now._

"_Even now, yes, but especially then. And yet, you have always claimed not to understand why I left you. Haruka, do not insult me. You understand perfectly well that I adore you. But you are lost to someone else, I can't be someone else. More importantly, I don't WANT to be someone else. C.J. Ephraim has a lot to offer, and I will never offer it to anyone in any serious way as long as you're around. So now you're not around, and that's good for me._

"_But you haunt me, as this journal will attest. Ten years, and the purple hearts still give me quivers. I still can't give myself to anyone because they are not you. I suppose, in a way, you are my Luo, the lost lonely tragic love of whom I cannot let go. And I know that you will never read these words, not you, not the real Haruka. But I'm hoping that by writing to you, I can purge you. If I can put all this on you, pretend that you live in this journal, confine your embodiment within my consciousness to this one book, then perhaps I can find the wherewithal to love someone else, and finally lock you away, put myself at peace._

"_Until my next fevered rambling, your friend, CJE."_

* * *

><p>"Oh, I am so, so good," the Doctor muttered to himself.<p>

He was staring at a petrie dish made of crystal-clear fibreglass. He had gone in with a fairly simple goal: find the _newest_ petrie dish, and then verify that it is, indeed, the strain that killed C.J. Ephraim. But what he'd found in the room had made it easier than he'd thought. A small, airtight vault, placed out of the way, where no-one was likely to stumble upon it, figured in the corner of the room. He hadn't seen it immediately upon entering, but when he'd inspected it, he'd realised it was for storing things that absolutely needed to be quarantined. Something about Ephraim had made him immune to the strain of the virus that had killed the rest of the city, and likely also the rest of the planet. It was only natural for Ephraim to assume that the strain killing him was stronger, and that it should be more properly contained.

And Eureka, there it was. It had taken the Doctor ten or fifteen minutes to manipulate the vault's controls to let him in with the sonic; it hadn't been deadlocked, but damn near! Ephraim had had tricked out the key pad to resist forced entry. From a sonic device. Most likely while he was sick and dying.

_Blimey, who taught this guy how to wire stuff? Whoever it was, well… hats off to you, mate, 'cause this is exactly what I would have done._

The Doctor realised that this particular thought had occurred to him several times recently. He smiled at it; he and Ephraim thought alike. Now there was something he couldn't say about very many people.

And the good news was, that their similar thinking had brought him to the correct (probably) petrie dish. There was still some verifying to do, of course, but he reckoned that finding this dish was good news and he'd like to tell Martha. He took it in his hand and turned toward the door.

But when he stepped into the archway of the storage room and looked out into the lab, he got suddenly lost in something else, involuntarily pulled into another whole question, another drama.

Martha was sitting on a hard wooden chair with one of Ephraim's journals, a purple leather one with a silver binding, in her lap. She was weeping. She wasn't hunched over with her face in her hands, filling her palms with tears; it was worse. It was silent and tight, and her body jerked a little with each oncoming rush of emotion. She was holding her breath, and the tears were falling copiously, down her face, over her lips and chin. They hung on and did not drop, clinging to composure, so like Martha herself. She had three fingers pressed against her lips, he assumed, to keep from letting out an audible sob. He knew she had been taken in by Ephraim's journals, particularly the memoir bits, but what the hell could wind her up like this?

And he found his hearts sinking. Whatever she was reading, she wasn't crying tears of joy. She was not reading a story about a boy being reunited with his dog. Tragedy had struck in Ephraim's life somewhere, and Martha's soul was in it now – which meant that his would be in it soon, too. He could not walk away from her anymore; perhaps six months earlier, he would have ducked back into the storage room out of sight, then cleared his throat to give her time to recover, so he wouldn't have to talk to her about it. But now? He had to know because he _had_ to help her fix it. She was his companion…

Oh boy. Perhaps they shouldn't spend too much time in this basement.

* * *

><p>"Are you all right?" a voice said from a place to Martha's left. The Doctor was there, and he took a tentative step toward her. He looked properly pained.<p>

She was startled, and as she looked up abruptly from the journal, tears lost their hold on her streaked cheeks and fell onto the pages. She shut the book quickly, half to protect it from further damage caused by her sadness, and half to shield it from the Doctor's eyes.

"Yes," she said, unconvincingly. "I'm fine." She hastily wiped her tears with the backs of her hands, and stood up.

He cocked an eyebrow and searched her face. She had managed to erase most traces of wetness from her skin, but her eyes were bloodshot, and she wouldn't look at him.

"You're not fine," he said.

"What did you find?" she wanted to know.

"Martha, what is…"

"Did you find the right dish?"

He frowned, and paused, lost in the heartbreak of what he was seeing. Martha was crying, hiding something written in a journal, and very clearly avoiding answering any questions about it. She had been all too excited to share the details of what she'd found in Ephraim's journals before this; what made this one different?

"Erm, yes," he said, clasping his hands in front of him and shifting his shoes uncomfortably. "I think I've found the right strain."

"How do you know?"

"Well, I don't. I just have a hunch. It's the newest dish of the lot, it was placed in a cleaner, more carefully quarantined space, which is what I would have done if I knew I was going to die from it," he answered. "But we need to be sure. If you'll grab me a tissue sample from C.J., maybe we can find something to compare it."

"Okay," Martha said, wiping her eyes again as a precaution. This disturbed the Doctor. She was careful to place the journal out of sight, under another book.

* * *

><p>A different manner of rehydrating solution than the fabric softener they'd used last time, and a microscope, told them what they needed to know. The disease that had killed C.J. Ephraim was, indeed, the same as the one in the quarantined fibreglass petrie dish.<p>

"So now we can work backwards, yeah?" she asked, putting the lid back on the specimen. "Use the notes to trace the mutations back to Lincomb's day?"

He didn't answer. She looked up at him. He was standing with both hands on the laboratory table and his eyes closed.

"Doctor?"

A moment later, he seemed to shake off whatever had over taken him, and he opened his eyes. He swooned slightly, and instinctively reached out and grabbed Martha's shoulder. Not hard, but firmly enough to let her know that he really did expect and need her support.

"Whoa," he said. "Got dizzy."

"From what?" she asked.

"I dunno," he said. "Just came on all of a sudden when I was…"

There was a pause. Martha's stomach hit the floor. "…examining the specimen. Get off your feet right now, Doctor."

"Martha..."

"No, I don't want to hear it," she instructed, taking his hands. She peeled his gloves off him and tossed them into the sealed rubbish bin they'd earmarked for biohazard items. "Give me those. They're contaminated."

"Martha…"

"Doctor, you were fine until twenty seconds ago, and then you got up-close-and-personal with a deadly virus, and suddenly you're dizzy…" she pressed her palm to his forehead. "And feverish. Come on. We're going upstairs."

He closed his eyes again and seemed almost to swoon once more. "Okay," he agreed, speech slurring slightly. "Maybe that's best."

He was fading fast. He stumbled back toward the storage room door. "No, no," she said, and she grabbed him under one of his arms and tried to lift him back to a stable, standing position. Together, they made their way up the stairs, round to the main stairs, and into the bedroom. He was still basically able to walk, but relied upon her heavily for direction, which meant he leaned on her quite a bit. He was, of course, twelve inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than she was – way too much for her to handle. It was quite a job getting him all the way up to the yellow bedspread, but when she did, she all but shoved him at the bed so he'd lie down.

Martha dug into his overnight bag. "Where are your pyjamas?"

"Didn't bring. Travelling light, remember?" he answered, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling.

"Well, Ephraim must have something you can curl up in," she suggested, crossing to the wardrobe. "Because I'm burning everything you're wearing now." She threw the double doors open and noticed, on the left, a set of light blue hospital scrubs folded neatly and placed on a shelf. She grabbed them and unfurled them, throwing them at the Doctor, and disturbing Ephraim's collection of neckties hanging inside the door. The scrubs, and one of the ties, landed on the Doctor's chest.

He put his hand on the clothes he'd been thrown, and examined them. "Hey," he mused. "This is mine. This is my tie."

"No, it's not, it came out of Ephraim's wardrobe. Now sit up, so I can get you out of that suit."

He sat up with the tie in his hand, and the scrubs fell to the floor. "Yeah, yeah, I'm sure of it. It's mine. Look. It's brown with little blue squares. Remember? I was wearing it that day when I went back in time, and I took it off right in front of you on Chancellor Street. I knew you, but you didn't know me."

"Well, perhaps the company that manufactured that tie made more than one, Doctor," she said. She took his arms and put them at his sides and began mechanically unbuttoning his jacket. Then she got behind him so she could pull it down his arms. "Mind giving me your arms?"

He did so, distracted and woozy. With great difficulty, and a serious effort at behaving _like a doctor_, and not blushing nor hesitating, she undressed the increasingly delirious Time Lord, and helped him into the scrubs. She got him to move on the bed just enough that she could wrap the covers round him.

"I'll be back in an hour, and you'd better be asleep," she said. "Close your eyes and rest. I'll be in the basement."

"Martha," he said, reaching out to grab her wrist. "How do you feel?"

"Fine. I think it's just you."

"Okay," he said, relaxing. Then, "Martha?"

"Yes?"

"I think you're brilliant."

"Thank you. I think you're brilliant too. Now rest."

"And you're pretty, have I ever told you that?"

"Doctor, seriously. Get some rest."


	9. Chapter 9

NINE

"_What was your name again?"_

"_Martha."_

"_And it was… Jones, wasn't it?" he asked, looking her up and down, having already admired her intelligent eyes and go-getter attitude, now internally cursing the white lab coat that hid her more interesting features._

_She nodded._

_"Well then, Martha Jones…" and he approached her, walking purposefully around the hospital bed between them and pushing the other girl aside. He grabbed her by the cheeks and kissed her. He could feel himself fall into the kiss, and her falling with him. _

_Three seconds their lips pressed together, then four, then five. Then ten._

_The hospital around them began to melt away, and in fact, the Doctor could feel everything changing. The area around them was becoming narrow, bricked alley, at night, after a perfect, refreshing downward rain. Martha, the new girl, she was excited, but beginning to relax, to feel easy with him. Their lips seemed to fit. _

_Her white lab coat was melting away too. He pulled away from her, now able to see what he'd been missing when she was dressed in the lab coat. A soft pink spaghetti-strap top revealed shoulders of smooth caramel, painted-on jeans cruised over dramatic, womanly curves, and a pair of gold hoop earrings now drew attention to her smooth, luscious neck. He wanted to kiss it._

_In fact, he wanted to kiss every inch of her._

_Just as the lab coat had concealed a tantalisingly curvy body, the beautiful face, the coif, the trendy clothes… they all concealed a fantastic brain. The brainy medical student drew attention away from the gorgeous woman, and the gorgeous woman drew attention away from the brainy medical student. But it was all in there. She was the total package._

_He couldn't help himself, and he kissed her again, this time with his arms around her, his hands sliding down her back. Suddenly, the smell of something burning reached his nostrils._

"_What is that?" he asked her, breathlessly._

_His lips moved and slid down her cheek and chin and neck, and she whispered, "I'm burning for you, Doctor."_

_The burning he could smell, it was her. Parts of her were literally on fire, and he could now feel a searing heat coming from somewhere below her waist. It made him twist, jerk away instinctively, but he didn't want to. He wanted to remain with her, kissing her, making her burn even more, until he burned as well. Until they burned together._

_He pushed her up against a filthy brick wall, damp and mouldy and teeming with disease. And then he didn't know how, but suddenly, he'd buried himself inside her. Tingling and pushing, fucking her, seeking the infernal, dangerous, languorous, burn. He could feel the scald, now the heat had jumped from her to him, and was spreading. They caught fire together, and it was unbearable – the heat, the blistering, the bursting, the blackening of their skin like charred wood. But it was exquisite. _

_Her eyes were wide with pleasure and alarm. Her skin was bubbling and splitting. It was horrible to watch, but he couldn't stop burning her. His own skin was bursting open and fluid was leaking out – blood, lipids, the liquid of an ugly death. But he couldn't stop._

"_Martha, wake me up," he said to her, desperately._

"_I'm here, Doctor," she said, still burning, still breathless and consumed. "I'm here, wake up!"_

"_Martha!" he said, now louder. "Make the burning stop!"_

"_Just see me," she said. "The burning will stop if you open your eyes, and see me!"_

"_You need to see me too," he told her. "See me, see into my mind, see the wheel, the colours, the Mandala!"_

"_I don't know how," she said. "I want you to come back to me! Wake up!"_

"_Martha! You'll see it… it's happening right now! Now!"_

_And then there was a crisis of sorts. His body seemed to explode upon her, and into her, and the fire drowned with cold…_

* * *

><p>"Aagh!" he cried out, sitting bolt upright.<p>

"Oh, thank God," Martha breathed.

He was in C.J. Ephraim's bed, soaking wet, and Martha Jones was standing over him with an empty glass.

"Did you just douse me with water?" he asked, incredulously wiping the wetness out of his eyes.

"Yes," she said, her voice high with alarm. "You were screaming at me in your sleep and you wouldn't wake up. I was afraid your fever was making you crazy, like cooking your brain or something. Thought you might try to hurt yourself, or me."

"Oh," he said, opening his eyes again. "Sorry. What did I say?"

"You were begging me to wake you up, and I was shaking you," she said. "I said if you'd just open your eyes, I'd be there. Then you said something about how you wanted me to see the Mandala."

"Whoa," he said, once again, rubbing his eyes, remembering the dreamy images of skin charring, bodies burning, pleasure breaking them apart.

"Were you dreaming?" she asked.

He blinked hard and opened his eyes wide at her. "Yes."

"Must have been intense."

"Yes. There was… fire."

"Well, a million-degree fever will do that. Fortunately, I'm here, and I have these," she said, handing him two pills.

"What are they?" he asked, taking them.

"I found them in a house down the street," she told him, pulling the bottle from her pocket, showing him the blue logo on the front. "The label says they're a fever reducer."

"Okay," he said. "Water?"

"Hold on," she said. She moved toward the bathroom. "I had some, but then I used it for a purpose I hadn't intended."

And indeed, the water she'd thrown on him was causing the scrubs to stick to his skin. He didn't like it – it made him feel a bit claustrophobic. He'd have liked to peel off the shirt, but dared not, considering the dream he'd just had. He was feeling a bit sheepish about the alleyway activities in his subconscious, and right now, the warmth in his veins had little to do with the fever. He didn't want to just start stripping, knowing Martha would be coming back into the room any second. He tried tossing the blankets off, if only to feel less encumbered by the wetness, but found that the state of things in the scrub trousers was also bound to cause its share of embarrassment. So he stayed covered, and seated.

Martha returned with water and he swallowed the pills. Then, he realised that the smell of something burning was still in the room, for real.

"What is that smell?" he asked.

She smirked. "You asked me that a minute ago, in your sleep. I'm burning your brown suit. And the shirt and the pants and socks. The shoes got thrown in a ditch when I was out walking."

"Oh. Okay. You're using the fireplace?"

"Yep. You'll just have to wear blue from now on. After you get on your feet, that is."

"Okay."

She put her hands on her hips and stared at him. "You look a little bit better."

"I feel a little better. Still not great. Do you mind leaving so I can shower?"

"Sure. I'll make you something to eat while you do that."

"Okay, thanks."

The Doctor waited until she was out the door and down the stairs before standing up. He was woozy, but he managed to get himself into the bathroom and undressed. The cold shower served a dual purpose.

* * *

><p>"Knock knock," a voice said from outside the door.<p>

This caused a throbbing pain to go bounding through the Doctor's skull. He closed his eyes and recovered, and said, "Just a moment. I'm not dressed yet." He pulled Ephraim's thick navy blue robe around him and tied it. He briefly marvelled at how well it fit. "Come in."

She walked into the bedroom with a stack of clean sheets. "I'm going to change these sheets. I want you down on the sofa and under a blanket eating ham, in five seconds. Go."

"Where did you get ham?"

"It's not ham, it's some kind of canned meat that sort of tastes like ham. It's on the coffee table, along with some crisps and some tea. Go."

"Let me help you…"

"No," she insisted. "Go! Get off your feet, you silly thing!"

He chuckled and obeyed, because another huge wave of searing, throbbing pain came shooting across his head, and he felt it better to sit down. As he exited the bedroom, he realised he was nowhere near recovered. The fever was still very much entrenched in his system, the weakness was still with him. And to his surprise, not even the dream's effects had quite left him. He was still ruminating over it, the burning, the unexpected desire he suddenly felt for this woman whom he had previously seen as a very close friend…

He eased himself down onto the sofa, leaned back and shut his eyes. A wave of nausea came over him, and he really thought for a moment he'd have to find the nearest bin, but then it abated. The smell of the not-ham was not-appealing, but he knew Martha was going to make him eat it for the protein, and he knew that Martha would be right to do it.

And before he knew what was happening, she was back in the room with him.

"All right?" she asked.

He sat up and looked back at her. She was cradling the sheets she'd just taken from the bed. She tossed them into the fire and came round the sofa. She threw a blanket over him and sat down. She pressed her hand to his forehead and said, "It's gone down, but not down enough."

Again to his surprise, that felt good too, like the fever could be abated with the easiness of her touch, hot though it was.

"Yeah," he agreed.

"Eat something," she said leaning over and pouring two cups of tea from a white porcelain teapot.

He smiled. "Beans the other night, tea now," he said. "You must feel right at home. It's like Britain away from Britain."

She answered, "Yeah, well, Ephraim was one of us."

"Was he?" the Doctor asked. "You know that the TARDIS' translation circuits are still working in your head, right? So his journals seem to be in English to you…"

"He wrote the actual words, _I am British,_" she said with a sigh, remembering Ephraim's sad story. "And apparently he could also speak Japanese."

She handed him a little slice of not-ham on a napkin. He took it, but looked at it with distaste. Again, the smell assailed his nostrils and threatened to make him heave. He decided to distract himself with conversation, as he choked down the food.

"Have you been able to find anything else?" he asked her.

"It's only been six hours," she said. "So no. I thought the best thing would be to try and work out why the virus is attacking you and not me. I mean, obviously it has something to do with species, but what? Ephraim was the last to survive, and if humans are immune, it might mean that his partial humanity kept him from getting it for a while. But the part of him that wasn't human succumbed…"

"…until his human half wasn't strong enough to fight it off anymore."

"Yep. The key is why. What is it about human biology that's keeping the virus at bay?" she asked, thinking aloud, looking worried. "It's hard to get anything organised enough down there to do any real good. His notes are scattered, as you know. I've been trying, like we said, to work backwards with the mutation pattern, but none of the petrie dishes are labelled, and without proper notes, I'm at a loss. I just hope..." She trailed off, suddenly sad and staring at her hands in her lap.

"What?"

"I just hope I can help you before..." she looked at him. There weren't tears yet, but he knew that she was holding them back with everything she had.

"Listen," he said. "I'm going to be fine."

"You don't know that."

"No, but think about it. There are two of us, and volumes and volumes of research already done for us. With Ephraim, it was just him. Just one guy, doing all the work himself."

"Doctor, you're not going to help," she insisted. "You are sick, and this virus killed someone. Here, in this house, and we have no idea why."

"You need to let me help you."

"You're not going back down into that basement!"

He exhaled slowly, jaw set sideways. "Fine. But why don't you bring up some of his journals and we'll try to get them organised. I'll stay here on the sofa, under my blanket, and I swear, I'll stop the minute I start to feel weak or sleepy or like I have to sneeze, or anything. I promise. I can't just lie around and watch you suffer."

"Me suffer?" she asked, nearly choking on the words. "Are you mad?"

"Of course. But I'm right. This is harder on you than on me."

She sighed and stared at the ceiling for a few moments. Then she said, "Thirty minutes."

"Thirty minutes?"

"Yes. I'll bring up some journals, and you can help me for thirty minutes. And then it's back to bed with you. I'm not having you die trying to help me organise some dead guy's library."


	10. Chapter 10

TEN

Ten minutes later, they were on the sofa, two large boxes filled with journals piled in front of them. The Doctor noted internally that the purple leather one was absent from the supply she'd brought up.

They compared notes and began cross-referencing, and even began tearing pages out and making smaller pile. It hurt Martha to do so, but they needed to categorise things in a more cohesive fashion. It seemed to them that Ephraim only ever wrote in one book at any given period of time, and whatever he was doing, all of it went into one volume. Personal thoughts, snippets of his memoir, lab results, ideas for new inventions... all of it together and frustratingly non-linear.

Martha caught a fairly detailed drawing of a mutated cell, and thought it might be useful.

"Doctor, I..." she stopped. She looked to her left and saw him immersed in something Ephraim had written. "What are you looking at so intently?"

"Listen to this," he said, then he began to read aloud. _"Me being me, I know better than almost anyone how cause-to-effect works. Therefore, I know that my life didn't begin the day I was born. The wheels of my existence have been turning for much longer than I can or should describe for the purposes of a standard-issue memoir. At some point, I'll go back a bit further and tell you more about life before I came into it, but for the moment, here is a kind of rudimentary start to my story._

"_I believe I'm in my fifties now, but I can't be quite certain. I was born in the early twenty-first century, obviously, but I'm not sure exactly when or where. The frenetic nature of my family life made time and dates, in a manner of speaking, meaningless, and the circumstances of my birth didn't help much. I came early, you see; my mother was not expecting my arrival for at least another month, and my parents' plan to be in London in time for her due date went chaotically awry. My father was obliged to deliver me on the road, as it were._

"_It could have been a lot worse, mind you. History is rife with stories of children being born in unusual circumstances (Winston Churchill, for instance); many a frantic, frightened father has had to deliver his own child. But we were lucky, as both of my parents were doctors, and my father had had children before. He was neither frantic nor frightened as he brought me into the world, but my mother said he cried. I did not understand until I was much older that his tears were bigger than just those of a happy, proud father holding a son for the first time._

"_I'll get into them with more detail later more later. Suffice it to say, my parents, they are complicated folk. As far as I know, they never married, but there was so much - _so much_- love. I could feel it in the air every day that I was with them. Their relationship with one another was hard-earned and solid. If you are someone who believes that the circumstances surrounding one's conception can help shape one's personality, then it should be no mystery why I am such an intense person. I am the product of an unexpected revelation, the manifestation of a fit of passion, the proof of a long-incubating burn._

_"Though, my memories of them are spotty now – as I said, our family life was rather frenetic, and these days I wonder if some of those memories could possibly be accurate. I see my mother's face when I close my eyes sometimes, against surreal backgrounds that seem absurd for a rational mind. I think that I watched my father do things that shouldn't rightfully be possible. But knowing what I know, knowing where things ended up, knowing where I ended up, I have to believe it's all true. They tried to raise me with as much normalcy as they could, but I did not achieve any measure of normalcy in my life until after they were gone."_

"Wow," Martha said. "We should start setting aside pieces of the memoir after we get you cured. Put it together for him, like he probably planned to do someday. This is a good story, and it's worth telling."

"Yeah," the Doctor said to her, distracted. She had the distinct feeling that he hadn't heard her.

"Doctor? Hello?"

"Sorry," he said. "I guess I'm just feeling woozy. Mind if I go back up to bed?"

"No," she said, standing up, offering her hand. "I think that's a good idea."

She helped him up off the sofa, and made to help him to the stairs. But he protested. "Thanks, I can make it."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes," he said. "I think I'll try and sleep through the night, all right?"

She nodded, concerned.

* * *

><p>Martha had crushed the fever-reducers into powder and mixed them with water, and poured them down the Doctor's throat. It's no simple task getting someone to swallow when they're unconscious, and it takes time. But she had done it. She had also mixed some sugar water and done the same, to give him calories. She had done this four times in twenty-four hours. He was out completely, dead to the world, as they say, but breathing relatively normally, and his blood pressure was normal (she assumed, anyway, from what she could tell). His fever went up and down with the administration of the drugs, and to keep him from overheating, she'd taken the robe off him. Not an easy feat, considering he was dead weight and totally naked... but she let him sleep. She wanted him to reserve his strength. If she woke him, he'd insist on helping again, and the last time, it had wiped him.<p>

Though, she was vaguely aware that sometime soon, she'd have to get him up so he could use the toilet and eat something for real sustenance. She wasn't keen on force-feeding him mushed-up beans or not-ham. She really wanted to stop short of giving him baby food or anything intravenous.

Martha was in the basement working with a sample, and she was, to put it mildly, knackered. She looked at the clock. It was past time for another dose of drugs and sugar. Would she wake him up this time? Probably should – it had been a whole day since he'd gone up to bed after reading the snippet about Ephraim's birth.

She dragged herself into the kitchen and emptied two pills onto a cutting board. She took the knife and pressed it sideways against the pills and felt them give. Then she did it again. And again. Her eyes closed involuntarily as she worked, and suddenly, she felt a small but sharp pain across her middle finger. She opened her eyes; she had cut herself.

_Note to self: handling sharp knives while running on no sleep is not a stellar idea. _

She ran the cut under some cold water and then tore off a piece of dishtowel to bandage it. Then she continued to crush the pills, trying desperately to remain alert enough not to cut her hands to ribbons. She extracted two glasses from the cabinet and filled them with water. She poured the powder into one, and several tablespoons of sugar into the other. She stirred, trying to dissolve the grains, again, her eyes sliding shut from exhaustion.

And in this stupor was when she heard the horrible sound.

"Martha!" came bursting from the bedroom upstairs, startling her. The scream was piercing and panicked. He called out again. "Martha! Please!"

She grabbed the glasses and ran up the stairs, spilling a bit. She burst into the room to find the Doctor sitting upright, his hands buried in his hair, screaming her name.

"Doctor, what is it?" she asked, frantically, setting the glasses down on the floor by the door.

He didn't answer, he just kept screaming her name, begging her to come to his side.

_Shit - I waited too long for the fever-reducer this time!_

She assumed he was still asleep like last time, so she tried to shake him awake, extract him from the night terror, or whatever he was experiencing. It didn't work. He tried to stand up, so she crawled on top of him, straddled his legs and tried to hold him down. She tried to push him back to a lying position, with limited success. All the while, he was screaming, protesting, panicking for some reason, and she was yelling back, protesting just as hard, trying to calm him.

Finally, she pulled back with her right arm and with everything she had, she slapped his cheek. The sound crackled through the air of the tight bedroom like a whip, and from the startled noise he made, Martha could tell he was awake now.

"Martha?" he asked, relatively lucid.

"Yes," she said. "Doctor, you were having a nightmare."

"What are you doing," he said, putting his hands on her hips. She realised that it must be a very strange experience for him, waking up to her straddling him.

She stood up. "Trying to keep you from throwing yourself over the balcony or something. Sorry."

"Don't be sorry... just... are there butterflies in here?"

"Excuse me?"

"The man in the glass ball said there would be butterflies. Just like at home in Istanbul."

A chill ran up her spine, hearing the nonsense he was spouting. His brain was fevered still, she knew, but she had to verify that he wasn't still asleep.

She turned on the lights, and her hands flew to her mouth. "Oh, Doctor," she cried out, before bursting into tears.

He was sweating profusely, and his eyes were sunken, black rings circling them like a raccoon. In fact, they were swollen almost shut. His skin was grey and dull, with no life nor pinkish hue whatsoever. She could see strong blue lines, indicating veins peeking through transluscent flesh. She could almost see the network of veins and arteries under the skin, coming to cumulate at two different points in his chest, where his hearts dwelled. Frankly, he looked dead.

"Martha, are you crying?" he asked calmly.

"Yes," she said, coming toward him. "Oh, God, I can't believe... Doctor, I'm sorry!"

She touched his forehead. He was burning up.

"I'll be right back, Doctor," she promised. "I'm going to double your dose. We've got to get that fever down. Do not move, do you hear me? Don't move!"

She went downstairs with the water cup in which she had dissolved the first two pills. She crushed two more through her tears, trying to concentrate, rather than cry, so she wouldn't cut herself again.

This time, while she was working, she heard creaking on the stairs. She grabbed the glass and went back to the living room. The Doctor was stumbling down the stairs, and had nearly made it to the landing, completely nude and delirious.

"No, no you don't," she warned. She ran up to meet him, and thrust the glass into his hand. "Drink this. All of it. Right now."

To her surprise, he obeyed without resistance, and she took him by the arm to help him sit down on one of the steps as he drank. She ran back to the bedroom and grabbed the robe she had discarded earlier and came back to drape it over the Doctor's shoulders. The combination of sweating and running around naked would not be good for his health.

She sat down beside him, and he leaned forward and buried his head in his hands, and groaned. After about two minutes he sat back upright and blinked a few times, and looked at her.

"Martha?"

"Yes," she said. She wiped away a few tears. "I'm here."

"What am I doing here?" he asked.

"Never mind," she said. "Let's just get you back to bed. We'll change the sheets again in the morning. You're very, very sweaty, and very, very sick. "

Once again, she helped him stand up, and he looked at her squarely.

"You look terrible," he said. "Are you well?"

"I'm fine," she told him, guiding him up the stairs. "Let's worry about you."

"Why are you crying?" he asked, touching a tear that was, once again, making its way down her cheek.

"Don't worry about it," she dismissed him, again. "I swear to you, I'm going to work night and day to find this cure, Doctor. Don't worry."

They crossed the threshold back into the bedroom and she pulled the robe off him, and he got into bed. He looked back up at her. "You _have_ been working night and day. How much have you slept?"

"Doctor, stop worrying about me," she insisted.

"You haven't slept at all, have you?" He could see that much, though his speech was still slurred, and the fever was still quite clearly driving many of his actions. He reached out and took her wrist, rather more roughly than he would if he were totally lucid. "Come here. Get some sleep."

"No, I can't," she said, trying to pull away unsuccessfully. "I have to work."

"You have to sleep. You can't help me if you're passed out on the floor in the basement."

"True, but..."

"You look as bad as I feel."

"Doctor..."

"Come on, Martha," he said. He sat up again and leaned toward her. He put both arms around her waist and pulled. Next thing she knew, she was off her feet and being pulled into bed. She felt him pull the covers over them.

"The equipment is on in the basement," she said, now her speech slurring too. She was succumbing.

"Sod it," he said, tightening his arms around her.

"The lights are on..."

"Shhh."


	11. Chapter 11

**You people are amazing! I hope, even though it seems most of you have worked it out, that you'll keep reading to see how it unfolds. A fairly important step needs to be taken before C.J.'s story can really be rounded-out... that's the bit I'm good at! But first, let's get the Doctor cured!**

**FYI: Biology is SO not my forte, and I am not an expert in regeneration processes. So there.**

* * *

><p><span>ELEVEN<span>

Martha and the Doctor both woke approximately eight hours later, and he was showing serious signs of improvement. In fact, he sat up in bed, was joking around, even wanted to eat. He was doing so well, that Martha brought more of the journals into the bedroom and the two of them spent several hours that following day, poring once again over Ephraim's notes. But by the evening, the Doctor was feeling nauseated again, he vomited a few times, and was back to clammy, fevered, worried ramblings once more. By the early hours of the dark morning, he was screaming in his sleep again, and Martha was slapping him awake and forcing drugs into him, and lying with him while he shook, promising not to leave him alone, ever...

And over the next week, this became the cycle. He was not getting worse in the long-run, she reckoned, but he'd have extreme bouts of feverish confusion, panic and avidity, followed by extremely high spirits, and then another slow decline into madness. He seemed to have plateaued upon a frustrating circular pattern which would not allow either one of them to function quite properly.

The seventh time he'd awakened from a fevered dream and was sitting up in bed sharing not-ham and some fresh fruit from trees outside with Martha, he said, "I had a revelation last night."

"Yeah? Good, 'cause I've got nothing."

"I think it's my regenerative qualities doing this to me. Regeneration is my way of cheating death, especially if it happens this slowly. My body can prevent it. It won't let me die. I get so bad, so sick that I'm on the brink of death, and the regenerative thing kicks in and makes me feel all shiny and bright again. But because I don't actually die, I can't fully regenerate so... here I am. It just keeps happening over and over, which is keeping me sick. This same old face, same old body, still sick, possibly indefinitely." He was chewing some food on the side of his mouth and staring past Martha, who was sitting cross-legged at the foot of the bed.

"Would you rather just die and regenerate?" she asked, a little afraid of what he might say.

"No," he said quickly. "Really, no. But this? This is rubbish."

"I agree," she told him. "I'm trying, I really am."

"I know you are," he told her, patting her hand. "It's not an accusation, Martha. Quite the contrary in fact. You have been... amazing."

"You'd do it for me," she said, shyly staring into her teacup.

"That's not the point," he told her. "The point is you're taking care of me at a time when perhaps no-one else could. I'm really glad you're here, Martha."

"Thanks. I admit, I needed to hear that."

"You're going to make an excellent doctor. You're clever and loving and tender, and you have so much compassion, it actually hurts me to watch. And God, you've put up with so much..."

"What makes you say that?" she asked, feeling nervous suddenly. She didn't know why she felt that way, exactly.

"Just me, being difficult, walking around naked and then not being able to find my way back to the bedroom. And being all... you know... _grrrr_ in my sleep and stuff," he said.

The flush of heat came over him as well, because dreams of Martha had become a nightly matter for him. Desire had been plaguing him in his feverish sleep. Every time he woke to find Martha on top of him holding him down, or standing over him with an empty glass, or lunging across him to keep him from beating his own chest into a bruised pulp, he was waking from dreaming of her. Taking her against the wall of that damp alley had been just the beginning. Martha's passion in the dreams was increasing, and the violence of his own lust in return was growing more and more intense.

And each day in these awake, lucid intervals, he was finding that he was less and less able to shake the dream imagery, and less able to put out of his mind how he felt. It wasn't just the lust anymore; thinking of her compassion and heart, and especially now, saying these words to her... it was choking him. Something big was happening, something powerful rising inside, and not just the virus.

He cleared his throat. "Anyway, thank you."

"Don't mention it," she said, gulping. A pause, and then, "Are you feeling up for some more journal-diving?"

"Sure."

"I'll get this cleaned up." With that, she picked up the tray which she'd used to bring up the meat and fruit and tea, and left the room.

The Doctor leaned back and relaxed a bit. He looked round the room, and noticed, not for the first time in the last several days, the purple leather journal sitting on the night stand on Martha's side of the bed. Although, today, he noticed, there was a pen lying across the pages. He leaned over for a closer look, and saw that Martha had been making her own notes in the journal, alongside Ephraim's. He was not able to make out what she'd written, but he could recognise her handwriting.

He heard her stirring downstairs and beginning to come back up. Again, he wondered, why is she keeping this one book around, out of all of them, and not sharing it with him? Why wouldn't she tell him the story, as she had told him every other story of Ephraim's that she'd run across, and vice versa? He recognised vaguely that his changing feelings for Martha were making this situation all the more frustrating for him, and wondered, even so, whether something like this would have bothered him quite so much six months earlier.

She came back into the room with a box just then.

"Martha?" he asked, glancing at the purple journal.

"Yeah?"

"Never mind."

"Er, okay," she said, setting the box down on the bed near the Doctor. "I was up late last night again. Blimey, this thing is slow going. I thought I was onto something, but then I realised that we only had partial notes on that particular strain, the one I was looking at. If only this thing didn't mutate so damn fast."

"Yep – I think that's what Ephraim and everyone else in the universe who's come up against this thing must have said."

"Plus, I keep getting distracted by the anecdotes. I think we've come upon a group of journals from the specific era in which he was really serious about his memoir."

"Yeah? What have you found out on that front?" he asked, glancing pointedly at the purple journal, hoping it would give her the hint.

But if it did, she ignored it. "Well, for instance, yesterday, I ran across some stuff about his aunt. She worked for a British MP for most of her adult life. She was someone who booked appointments for him or something like that. Anyway, he'd written about how high-strung she was, but how very good at her job, and how he admired her work ethic and her stick-to-it-iveness. He called her _cute_, and said that his uncle's nickname for her was 'Stitch,' because she could make him laugh, but she was wound very tightly. Plus it was some kind of play on her name... oh!"

"What?"

She had been leafing through some loose papers while talking, and had run into something somewhat surprising. "These are some loose papers from a pile down there," she told him. "I've just been sort of throwing stuff in there that I find, figuring we'd sort it out later."

"So?"

"Well, look." She held up a couple pieces of paper, both soiled with brownish stains.

"Oh," he said, his eyebrows going up. "Those are the papers that were under his head when he died."

"Yeah," she agreed. "I'd forgotten all about this group. I don't know why we didn't start with this stuff!"

"What does it say?"

She shuffled some of the papers around, and tried to match up which papers went with that particular group of information. She squinted at some white papers which looked as though they belonged with the soiled ones, and said, "It looks like the thing that killed everyone else was... restorative?" She squinted hard. "No, respiratory. Sorry, it's smeared."

"Oh. Well, remember, when we did his DNA profile, he had some kind of pulmonary anomaly."

"That's true!" she chirped. "Okay, now we're getting somewhere!"

The Doctor waited while Martha read further.

"Ephraim thought that this mutation was similar to a bronchial infection. Well, a really, really aggressive, nasty bronchial infection. It gave them fever while their lungs filled up with fluid and eventually drowned them. They were so interested in undoing the fever, they missed the fact that the fever wasn't what was causing them not to be able to breathe." She looked at the Doctor with a kind of annoyance. "Well, what kind of sense does that make?"

"None, to you," said the Doctor. "But you've got training in medicine. I'm going to presume that most of the people here did not. And with the plague spreading like wildfire and everyone sick everywhere, there probably weren't a lot of doctors and nurses available."

Not for the first time thinking of the situation in this city before the virus took the last person, she shuddered.

"Okay, keep going," the Doctor encouraged.

She nodded, and read aloud. _"My symptoms: visible blood clotting, unique to me."_

"Well, I've got that," said the Doctor. "Have you seen my chest?"

She nodded again, and continued. _"Increased blood pressure, feverishness, weakness, hallucinations possibly associated with oxygen deprivation."_

"Interesting. My dreams could be oxygen deprivation. Never thought about that."

"Dreams?"

He cleared his throat. "Yeah," he said. "Er, yeah. Some really intense ones."

"Like that first night, the one with fire?"

"Yeah, like that."

"Hm."

"Keep reading."

_"Tested saliva with samples of raw Figlozine 9. Within twenty-four hours sample had been consumed. My bio makeup against the gen population... given my current decline and diff of symptoms..."_

"Whoa," the Doctor breathed. "Martha, read that again."

_"Tested saliva with samples of raw Figlozine 9. Within twenty-four hours sample had been consumed. My bio makeup against the gen population... given my current decline and diff of symptoms..."_

"...he posits that the current strain of the virus is attracted to and feeding on the enzyme Figlozine 9."

She opened her mouth to argue, then looked at the papers in front of her. She scowled. "Yes."

"Ha! I knew it! What else?"

"Nothing much," she said. "This must have been his final conclusion, or close to it. The handwriting is deteriorating, and it seems incomplete."

"It doesn't matter!" the Doctor said cheerfully.

"Why? What the hell is Figlozine 9?"

"It's an enzyme found in certain parts of the universe," he said. "It's not exactly rare, but it's not found anywhere in _your_ solar system, so that's why you've never heard of it. It's organically occurring, obviously, and there's a high concentration of it in me."

"In you?"

"Yeah. In Time Lords. Our hearts. The muscle tissue is composed of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, just like yours, but the bonding agent, as it were, is Figlozine 9! It's a little bit volatile, almost... well, almost has a mind of its own. It's one of the reasons the Time Lord binary vascular system functions so well. Your heart, Martha... _your_ heart pumps blood, and the blood moving helps it pump, and it's all very symbiotic. For me, the hearts are working overtime because there's this active, acidic enzyme causing the heart muscles to expand and contract on their own. The blood pumps better that way..."

"...because the hearts don't have to rely on the propulsion factor in circulation to keep them moving," Martha finished. "I get it!"

"Correctamundo. Wait, I said I'd never say that again, sorry," he corrected. "_Exactement!_"

"So that's why you're able to run longer and jump higher and be this giant ball of energy all the time. Your hearts make you stronger."

"Yep. Except now there's this virus keeping me weak. It's attacking my hearts! It's eating away at actual tissue, which is what's causing the regenerative reaction in me – it just replenishes. And, it's messing with my blood and my oxygen supply which is what's giving me the dreams and the fever and..."

"So what about Ephraim?"

"Whoever he was, his non-human aspect must have been from some other planet where Figlozine 9 is built into the biology," he explained. "There are a few of them that I could name off the top of my head right now, and dozens more if you gave me some time. It sounds like it was attacking his blood stream, kind of like it is with me."

"So what does this mean?" she asked.

Eyes wide, teeth bared, mischief and happiness radiating from his face, he said, "I know the cure."

"Is it something I can do, something I can understand?"

"Absolutely."


	12. Chapter 12

TWELVE

It took four whole days for Martha to gather the ingredients for an antidote. The Doctor gave her a list, but half of the things on it were chemicals or devices she'd never heard of. The first day she spent in Ephraim's lab, ascertaining which ones, and in what quantities, could be found in-house. The second day, she intended to find a hospital or research facility, which she did, but even then, she had a lot of territory to cover, and no visual reference for some of the items. She had a lot of questions, and to make matters worse, the Doctor was immobile still, and only fully lucid for two hours that day. And the times when he was delirious, she was afraid to leave him alone. He always woke up screaming and yelling and trembling, and she wasn't sure what he would do, or how he would wake, if she wasn't there.

Days three and four were utterly exhausting. She had spent them going out and coming back, going out and coming back, until she'd been on her feet for eighteen hours each day and collapsed in bed beside the Doctor. Then of course, the nastiness would begin and the screaming commence. She was beyond fatigued by the time the ingredients were gathered, but she was determined not to let him know it. She just wanted the antidote made, and the Doctor back.

"Are you okay?" he asked, leaning on her as the two of them made their way to the landing, and around the corner.

"I'm fine," she said. "I'm not the sick one."

"No, but I'm pretty much putting all my weight on you," he said. "And I can see how tired you are, even if you're trying to hide it." He stopped for a moment to swoon.

"Do you want to go back to bed and try again tomorrow?" she asked, searching his face, recognising the dizziness and the tight swallow that meant he felt he needed to vomit and was holding back.

"No," he said. "Let's just do it now so it can be over with."

They made their way slowly down the stairs, and the Doctor sat in the chair where C.J. Ephraim had died, and instructed Martha on how to mix the drug that would save him. The proportions were simple enough, it was the equipment that was tricky. She had taken a plasma separator from the hospital which would shake up the mixture as only such a piece of machinery could, but the Doctor warned her that if she shook it for one second too long, it would be ruined and she'd have to start again.

Fortunately, she was precise. Next came what the Doctor called the _la pièce de résistance_, the enzyme known as Soriozine. This required heating, again, to a very precise temperature. Martha did not have to be told that this would be a delicate process, as the Soriozine had been exceedingly difficult to acquire. It was a somatic enzyme from the humanoids who inhabited the galaxy they were in, and had to be taken from bodies in the hospital's morgue. Each body had only yielded half a kilolitre, and they needed at least three kilolitres to make a properly-proportioned mix. If this didn't work, Martha didn't want to have to think about where she was going to have to go to find more dead bodies.

"Why is this the _pièce de résistance_?" she wanted to know as she squeezed the heated enzyme into the rest of the mixture using a dropper. The solution turned blue, and for a few moments, it bubbled.

"It's sort of like a counter-enzyme to the Figlozine. They're both what you might call naturally-occurring stimulants, but they work in opposite directions. One of them can neutralise the other. And since Figlozine occurs naturally in me, and Soriozine doesn't, my body will fairly quickly process the Soriozine out, so the neutralising effects will be temporary."

"Oh, I see," she said, measuring the solution and pulling it into a syringe. "If you can neutralize the Figlozine, which the virus is feeding on, you can fool it into thinking that the enzyme is gone, and the virus will leave and try to jump to another host."

"Correct. But there won't be another host, since you don't carry Figlozine in your body."

"But won't that stop your hearts?"

"Not completely. Just slow them down for a while. Like I said, the effects will be temporary. I think all I have to do is sleep it off."

Martha smiled as she thumped the syringe twice to get rid of the air bubbles, and then pulled slightly more solution in. The Doctor rolled up the sleeve of his robe and made a fist. His veins were so blue, Martha had no trouble finding one and plunging the solution in. After that, Martha shut down the lab, they supported each other back up the stairs, to the bedroom, and both collapsed from exhaustion.

* * *

><p>And for the first time in almost two weeks, collapsing from exhaustion did not result in a downward spiral into confusion and delirium, morbid, fevered dreams in which the Doctor and Martha shagged each other to death and fell to the ground in a heap of ashes, or some such. The virus abated as the Doctor slept...<p>

...but his feelings for his companion did not. This time, the dream was like an opera – perfect, unwavering, soaring pitches, with lush, cushiony music floating all around them. Love brought them alive, made them grow and flower, rather than burn them from the inside out.

When the dream ended, the Doctor was left in a bedroom flooded with light, and he could actually hear birds, their song unsullied by a searing headache or the morning's first delightful onslaught of nausea. He felt like himself again, only better, because...

"Good morning," Martha said, opening her eyes and looking up at him. He was sitting up, gazing out at the lovely, foreign sunrise. "How do you feel?"

He smiled at her. She was even beautiful in the morning – how had he managed never to notice that before? "Never better," he told her.

* * *

><p>Martha stepped into the kitchen, and her face lit up. She felt great today. She felt relief beyond relief, not to mention clean. She was fresh from the shower, her hair wrapped in a towel and dressed in the clothes she usually slept in, while her other garments were washing.<p>

The Doctor, still not exactly clothed, was standing at the kitchen counter in a fresh set of scrubs that Martha had dug out for him, from one of the fully-packed storage rooms upstairs. He was spooning fresh fruits onto two large plates. "Wow. I didn't know Julia Child was a Time Lord," she commented.

He scoffed. "Please. Like anyone who _wasn't_ a Time Lord could do what she did. Use your head, Martha."

They both laughed, and he gestured to the kitchen table. She sat, and he followed her over a moment later. He'd made fresh coffee, waffles, and a varied fruit salad.

"How'd you do the waffles?" she asked. "Doesn't that require some highly perishable products?"

"He had a mix in the back of one of the cupboards. Just add water."

"Nice. But you didn't have to do this."

"Yes, I did. You have been so good to me, I owe you at least this much, and so much more."

"Doctor, you don't owe me anything. This is what friends are for," she insisted.

He smiled. "See? This is why you're brilliant and I should make you breakfast."

She shrugged happily and they ate a hearty breakfast together, and chatted about their next step, which was to see about curing Lincomb and the people of Sorofrann.

"I think we need to go back to Sorofrann," the Doctor told her.

"Okay."

"Want to know why?"

"Sure."

He smirked. Her legs were swinging back and forth under her chair, she was smiling wide, and practically chirping. He reckoned she was probably so happy to have helped him get well, that she didn't even care what came next. She must be feeling relieved to have someone reliable to talk to again, and not to have every single burden on _her_ shoulders alone.

"Because," he said, trying to concentrate on his words and not on her lovely smile. "This virus is not simple, but it is very stupid. If we can get a sample from Sorofrann and determine whether that strain of the virus is attacking something in their systems in particular, perhaps we can do for them what we did for me."

"Neutralise it and fool the virus into thinking it's gone?"

"Yep."

"Cool."

"Are you up for going today? I kind of want to get out of here for a while," the Doctor said. "Cabin fever."

"I don't know. I'm kind of virused-out. Remember I'm the one who's been conscious for most of the last eleven days. Also, I'm still a little afraid you're going to push too hard and make yourself sick again."

"I won't, I promise," he assured her. "I know how this body works, believe me. It's working fine."

"Still. Doctors are the worst patients – they think they know everything."

He kicked her lightly under the table. She chuckled.

"Well, why don't we finish breakfast, I'll have a shower, we'll both get dressed, and then see how we feel?" he asked.

"Okay," she agreed. "Can you pass the Kilulifruit?"

* * *

><p>Martha cleaned up the kitchen while the Doctor took a much-needed shower. It was the first he'd had since a couple of nights earlier when Martha, unable to get him to stop pacing round the bedroom in his sleep by slapping him around, had turned on the cold tap in the shower stall and shoved him under the stream as he walked past the bathroom.<p>

It was also the first proper, hot shower he'd had in a while. The fevers and troublesome dreams had made cold water a very good friend to him. But today, though at least part of that ardour had not faded, it was good to melt a bit into the warmth and enjoy feeling like a regular, warm-blooded being again.

He stepped into the bedroom and found that Martha had hung his blue suit on a hanger from the open wardrobe door for him, and placed his red trainers on the floor nearby, along with clean socks. He smiled at the sight. It appeared that she couldn't help herself; he was feeling one-hundred-per-cent today, but she couldn't stop trying to take care of him.

He took his time pulling on his trousers and buttoning his shirt and tying his tie. He didn't realise how long it was taking because he was lost in thought. His mind was skimming back over those dreams. _Open your eyes and see me_, she had said more than once. Most of the time, he'd reckoned it was because Martha really was, in reality, nearby, trying to get him to wake up.

But he now knew what it was, of course. His subconscious, all the while during his illness, had been trying to clue him in. _You love her, you dumb git. Does she really have to save your life __**again**__ in order for you to see it?_

Yes, apparently. And yes, he really could be a right moron sometimes, but the important thing now was that he knew it. But how to approach it, if at all?

He sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled on his socks. And as he leaned over to do the same with the shoes, a thing caught his eye. It was lying on the night stand. He felt vaguely as though it had been mocking him.

He'd seen her crying over it. He'd felt her hiding it from him. He'd witnessed her keeping it near. Whatever was written in this purple journal was something that had struck Martha, meant a lot to her for some reason, and she wasn't willing to share it with him. He had his qualms about delving into something she so clearly wanted him to steer clear of, but...

He didn't pick up the journal. He didn't even let go of his shoelaces. He just leaned over. In Ephraim's handwriting, in black cursive lettering, there appeared to be the end of a narrative, a letter to someone.

"_...circumstances, I've been asking myself whether you bothered to wonder at the wisdom of sending me a Christmas card. To do it at all was questionable, but to send a photo of you and your husband and details of your life that you knew would hurt me? Why?_

"_Why would you tell me that your husband is from Britain, an alien in your country, and that he's a biochemical engineer, like me? Why would you go out of your way to point out that he's nothing like your lost, tragic Luo, and more like me? Why would you make me wonder what was wrong with me, that could make this bloke able to make you forget Luo, when I couldn't? Why even bother wasting the ink it took to write the note, Haruka?_

"_I have to ask if you enjoyed my attentions... or even better, were indifferent to my attentions, but enjoyed the by-product of getting to ignore them. Everyone wants to be loved and coveted and put on a pedestal – did it make you feel powerful to ignore me? And when I left, did you panic and feel as though you should reel me back in? Get in touch and see how old C.J. is holding up? Well, blimey, it's been eleven years since I've seen him, better plant a bomb in his chest and make sure he's still pining, and wondering what he ever did wrong._

"_I bought this journal to help me get over you, and even on the other side of the planet, you won't let me._

"_And Merry bloody Christmas to you, too. CJE."_

The Doctor exhaled slowly through pursed lips. "Wow," he said quietly. "An angry, angry fellow."

He slid his eyes down to the red loopy handwriting that was Martha's.

"_Dear C.J., I don't know why why I feel compelled to console you. There are a hundred reasons why this is absurd, but still I need to relate my experiences to you, to show you that you're not alone. _

"_I knew the story of you and Haruka and Luo before I opened this journal, because I've lived it. And about the Christmas card, I have this to say: she's not hurting you on purpose. She knows on an intellectual level how you feel about her, but doesn't see what's in your heart. From everything I've read, she was a good friend, and a kind, intelligent woman. I choose to believe that she sent you the photo innocently. She got married, and was joyful. Friends are meant to share in each others' joy. I choose to believe that she told you about all the things you have in common with her husband because she wanted you to know that she values those qualities._

"_As I write this, I'm sitting up in bed, and the Haruka in my life is slumbering cluelessly, feverishly, at my side. He is tossing and turning, immersed in dreams of God Knows What. I look at him and I see that loving him, and feeling the loss, has made me feel richer. It seems condescending to say so, but I hope that you reached a point in your life when you realised that your experience with Haruka made you stronger. _

"_I'll leave you with this: Not long ago, he fell for a nurse. A medical woman, sensible, forward-thinking and bold. She was annoying as hell because she was a lot like me, and their relationship gutted me. He's quite literally the cleverest man in the universe. He sees everything, but he doesn't see me. Or at least, he doesn't acknowledge the part of me that longs for him. Nurse Redfern showed me that the part he does value is the inside, the part that wants to study medicine and help people, and push forward with life and science. That's who I am on the inside, that's who Nurse Redfern was on the inside. Whose outside he chose to kiss, I forced myself to believe, was irrelevant._

"_I don't know how much consolation that thought is to you... it didn't help me in the long run, but it was something that kept me sane for a short time. Maybe, if you're out there somewhere watching us, it will be a comfort to you. Maybe._

"_Fevered dreams are calling me, except they're not my own... how strange. Love, Martha Jones."_


	13. Chapter 13

**I don't know if anyone would have noticed, but I did SLIGHTLY change the name of the planet. This is because of an error I made earlier in planting clues about C.J. It's easier just to acknowledge the mistake and tell you why than to go back and fix all of the places where it comes up! Sorry!**

* * *

><p><span>THIRTEEN<span>

This was massive.

It was bigger than them. Two people who travel across time and space together, risking their lives, saving civilisations, changing history, _and_ they love each other! Well, it had been done before. But two people who travel across time and space, risking their lives, saving civilisations, changing history, and they love each other, but neither one knows it, and their feelings hang in the air like a big black bubble and threaten to consume them both? This had _never_ happened to him before. It was big. That's all he could think for a few moments. Big.

But it was fantastic!

_There are so many possibilities now_. He imagined the things he could now say to her, do with her, feel without compunction, or fear of her knowing. He could tell her about all those nasty dreams, and tell her how he had _enjoyed_ them, in spite of the morbidity and the terrible illness that had twisted them all out of shape. He could touch her, or even kiss her, without having to think up an excuse (_genetic transfer? Seriously?_). And he flogged himself a little for _that other thought,_ the lustful one, stirring at his core, so close to burning the forefront of his mind, and so soon! That was before realising that it was fully normal. He was a Time Lord, sure, but underneath it all, he was a bloke with working parts. A guy fancies a girl, he wants to... well. If he didn't, it would be weird. And five minutes ago it had been far off, something he'd have to work long and hard for, and he still might. But now he knew it's what she wanted as well. That thought gave him a frisson; dreams were one thing, but when faced with the reality, it was a different story. It came home to roost in his gut.

Oh, but this was horrible.

_She loves me! I can't be thinking about... that! _The Doctor supposed that, like Haruka with C.J., on an intellectual level, if he'd been honest with himself, he must have known. But that was brain. This journal was her heart. He'd never had a true-blue glimpse of it until now, never considered how his actions _really_ affected her. A good companion, if that's all she is, stands by and watches John Smith fall in love with Nurse Redfern, and reacts with frustration and bemusement because the aliens are attacking and the world might end. But someone who's more than just a good companion, someone who loves long and hard enough to risk life and limb like Martha had... she'll have an entirely different reaction! And he'd seen it now. How long had this been going on? How many times had he steamrolled over her emotions and expected her to react like the dutiful co-pilot, because that's how he saw her? It was probably a trillion tiny things that he'd never, ever know, and that scared him.

Massive, fantastic, horrible. All of the above, and he couldn't decide which was the most overwhelming right now.

But most of all, it was delicate. Some damage had already been done, so it now must be handled with care.

It took the Doctor at least another twenty minutes before he was ready to leave the bedroom, and face Martha on his own. Thoughts had to be organised, steps had to be taken.

It had become clear, almost from the moment they'd arrived, that C.J. was a fairly concrete entity in their lives, like a third person aboard the TARDIS. And this journal was an even greater, more imposing manifestation of that fact than the emaciated body in the basement. He took his time processing what he'd read, and devising how he would respond.

And eventually, he went downstairs.

"So what do you think?" Martha asked. She was curled up on the sofa reading the manual of a Disney/Apple product as the Doctor descended the staircase. "Do you still want to go out?"

"Yes, I think so," he said, rather quietly. "But not to get virusy. I do think we should get out of here, but let's do something fun."

"What is there to do?" she asked, wrinkling her nose, sceptical.

"What is there... wha... how can you even ask that?" he practically shouted, raising his arms with a big smile. "What _isn't_ there to do? Martha Jones, we have the whole planet to ourselves! Name something and you've got it!"

She smiled and shrugged. "I don't know. It would be nice to spend some time outside, I suppose. Been either in a basement or in that cramped little bedroom for the better part of two weeks. I guess I can see your point about the cabin fever."

"_Molto bene,"_ he exclaimed, clapping his hands. "I know just the thing to do! Are your clothes dry?"

"More or less."

"Well, put them on, pyjama girl," he told her. "We're going hunting for fluddberries."

* * *

><p>By the time Martha emerged from the bedroom with her hair up in a messy bun, wearing loose white cargo capris and a purple tank top, the Doctor had a rucksack packed. It was complete with lunch, some gathering receptacles and other things which the Doctor thought might come in handy on an afternoon in the sun with Martha Jones.<p>

For the first time since arriving, the Doctor and Martha ventured out together, into the afternoon heat of the planet known as Third From Pluto.

"Okay, so what the hell's a fluddberry?" she asked, following him to the end of the street, then to the right.

"They're an extremely sweet fruit. You'll love them – they taste like they've had cinnamon added. When they're super-ripe, they have a bite! We can have them for breakfast tomorrow!"

"How do you know where to find them?"

"They grow in various places in this galaxy. A few of the planets have big plantations of them, and this is the right climate for it. I thought we might just go looking."

The neighbourhood of small houses which contained C.J. Ephraim's incongruously large one was on the border of a large, lush field of yellow grass. It was like an oasis. When asked, the Doctor reported that this kind of grass grew in very soft soil, and it tended to be a bad idea to dig a foundation in it, so that's why the city and suburban sprawl seemed to be built _around_ the yellow patches.

Within a few minutes, they'd reached the field. And though the soil might have been bad for building, it was ideal for walking. It was cushiony and smooth, and the grass gave softly under their feet. Martha kicked off her shoes and carried them back to the curb at the edge of the field, knowing no-one would take them. She walked the rest of the way with velvety grass between her toes, a bed of soft soil beneath her feet, and her hand nestled in the Doctor's.

They talked and laughed, made a few plans, and above all, enjoyed the fresh air. After about thirty minutes, they reached the top of a hill, which really did signal the end of so-called "civilisation" in this part of the world. Though they could see city and houses on three sides, in front of them was all about the berries. And at the bottom of the hill, there was a building, followed by rows and rows and rows, as far as they could see, of orange plastic.

"What is all that?" asked Martha.

"Awnings," the Doctor told her. "The berries grow best in the shade, and this planet doesn't have much forest space, so they provide artificial shade. Only... it looks like a dust storm came through not too long ago. Look at how tattered it is, and dirty."

Martha shielded her eyes from the sun and looked.

"Oh well," the Doctor continued, shrugging. "Tattered awnings or not, there's bound to be _some_ sweet fruits out there!"

They began in the nearest row and began examining the berries. The Doctor showed Martha what a "good" fluddberry looked like, as far as colour, texture and size. To his mild disappointment, quite a few of them were overcooked by the sun or overgrown or half-eaten by insects. But it didn't matter much to Martha. She was just glad to be out of the house and doing something different with her Doctor.

* * *

><p>They spent a couple of hours at this, and they talked for a while. Eventually, they got so wrapped up in the work, they fell silent, except for once when Martha asked if anyone had ever thought to make wine out of fluddberries, and the Doctor answered, "Of couse."<p>

When they were thirty feet apart, checking fluddberries in different areas, the Doctor said, "Oi, hungry?"

"Yeah, now you mention it."

"I've got some lunch-like provisions for us in my rucksack," he said, checking one last berry.

But Martha was closer to it. She moved her plastic container filled with berries to a temporarily shady spot, and walked toward the rucksack.

A split second before her voice rang out, the Doctor realised that letting her dig in there was a big mistake.

"What the hell?" she cried out. It was almost a shriek.

"Martha, don't..."

"Why did you bring this?" she asked, holding up the purple journal with one hand, her other hand planted on her hip. "What are you even... what? What the hell?"

He sighed. "Martha, don't be angry. I just..." he had no words.

"This is..." she said, winding up for a tongue-lashing. But she lost steam, because she didn't know quite what to say. She felt she had been violated somehow, but she wasn't sure how. It's not like it has _her _journal, and she had never specifically told him she didn't want him to see it. She had pointedly avoided talking about it, as a matter of fact...

...well, that alone, shouldn't that give him a clue?

Maybe, maybe not.

"It's what?" he asked, genuinely interested in what she had to say.

"It's private."

"Yes. All of it is private – all those journals from C.J. And we've been reading it like it's public record," he pointed out. "Technically, all I did was what we've been doing for two weeks. Reading C.J. Ephraim's documentations."

"You saw me with it," she said. "The day you got sick, you saw me."

"Yes. I saw you crying."

"And you saw me..." in lieu of words, she hid her hands behind her back, almost coquettishly. More accurately, she did it in a shy manner, child-like.

"Hide it? Yes. I saw that, too. And I noticed that you never brought it out when we were looking through stuff, and I noticed that you kept it at your bedside."

"You saw that."

"Of course."

She was quiet for a long while. She stared at the ground and shuffled her feet, stirring up dirt beneath her shoes. "Do you know why?" she asked. "Why I cried when I read it? Why I kept it from you and read it over and over again?"

He looked away. Now it was his turn to shuffle. "I do now."

She looked up at the sky, blue like the sky at home. Tears burned her eyes. She couldn't believe this. It felt like the whole world would come crumbling down upon her like a house of cards. She had built up a trust with the Doctor. She'd taken care of him again and again, risked everything, sacrificed her very happiness to be with him. And it was all under the carefully-constructed guise of _that's what friends are for_. Now it was over. Everything was going to change. And here she was, stuck on a foreign planet, with literally no-one in the world to talk to, except for him.

And now he knew everything. Everything.

She felt naked, like he could see her exposed. Worse, like he could see her heart beating in her chest, and her life's blood pumping through it. She felt like he could stop it at any time he chose, just reach out his Time Lord hand and make her heart cease beating.

She turned from him so he couldn't see her cry.

And the Doctor, he was beside himself. This was _not_ how this afternoon was supposed to go. This was _not_ his intention in bringing the journal with him. He had imagined a moment when he would reaveal it to her... fluddberries and a packed lunch...

"Why did you read it?" she asked, having to shout because she was turned away. "Why? You knew it was something..."

"Because I knew it was something," he said. "And I had to know what. I couldn't imagine what you could be so closely guarding, Martha. I thought... well, I don't know what I thought. I had nothing, no idea at all, and that bothered me. I'm not used to not knowing things."

Again, she stared at the sky. Still blue, but she noticed some storm clouds gathering, but didn't consciously think anything of them. Her heart was breaking – her own personal storm took precedence.

Another long silence ensued. Finally she bent and put the journal gently back inside the Doctor's rucksack and zipped it up, as though if she did that, it couldn't hurt her anymore. She turned back to face him, but did not look him in the eye. She kept her hands defensively placed on her hips. "So. What did you think of it? Interesting reading? Bestseller material?"

He took five large steps forward, purposefully coming closer to her. His voice lowered, and he said half with a whisper, half with a growl, "I think Haruka was an insensitve shrew."

Martha's eyes snapped up to the Doctor's. "What?"

"You heard me."

"That's... that's not nice."

"Nope. But it's the truth. Insensitive, harsh, and probably blind as well."

"Blind?"

He searched her eyes. A wind kicked up and was blowing the clouds in quickly, and it temporarily blew a strand of hair across her face. He gently moved it to the side. She looked up at him with sad, beautiful eyes, staring out from a perfectly-formed face, radiant skin and lips that now, with new revelations, were begging to be kissed. And he said, "Yes, blind. She'd have to be, wouldn't she, not to see?"

Martha's eyes narrowed. It was a weird moment. It felt very much like he was comparing himself to Haruka, and Martha to C.J., and like he was admitting to being an emotional moron for the past nine months. But, dozens of times, she'd felt he was admitting to this, or acknowledging that... and she'd always been wrong.

"What are you saying?" she asked.

"I think you know." He was deadly serious, his jaw tight.

"I think... I think I need a break. Just... can you not talk to me for a while?"

"Martha..."

"I need time to think."

"About what?"

"What I want to do," she told him. "How I... want to proceed."

He was alarmed, to say the least. "How you want to proceed? What does that mean?"

She broke eye contact and looked at the sky again. It had grown purple and dark. "The storm is gathering quickly now."

"Martha, you can't just..."

"We'd better find shelter somewhere."

"Okay."

Suddenly took her by the cheeks, as he had the day they met, and kissed her. Except, just like in his dream, three seconds became four, then five, then ten. She stood still and stunned, unable even to kiss back.

When he pulled away, her eyes were wide open and shocked. "What are you doing?" she asked.

"Finding shelter." And he resumed the kiss exactly as before, except Martha, less surprised, could respond. She grabbed onto his lapels with gusto and returned the kiss, even though she was still torn and angry, even though she was feeling leery, even though she was terrified, in spite of herself, of what this kiss could mean. When he opened his mouth a little, so did she. When he wrapped his arms around her, she did the same. They both felt as though this might be their last chance, so they stood in the field of berries, two confused souls, and clung to each other, even as the rains came.

The tattered awnings above did very little to keep them from being soaked.


	14. Chapter 14

**Had trouble with this one... hope you like it.**

****Martha lost her shoes again!**

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><p><span>FOURTEEN<span>

The heavens cried and poured upon them, and the Doctor and Martha took it all in blissful oblivion. Rain? Who cared? This was the kiss of their lives, the kiss that would define them, for better or for worse.

And in the midst of possibly the most cathartic moment of her short existence so far, Martha found herself suddenly covered with mud. She and the Doctor immediately let go of each other, and both of them cried out with unpleasant surprise. She scooped the mud out of her eyes, and found that the Doctor was in very much the same state.

"What the hell was that?" she yelled over the rainstorm.

The Doctor, his hair matted to his head, looked at the orange plastic coverings overhead, all around them. "There must have been a pocket of dirt from the dust storm, resting on the awning!"

"Right over our heads!"

"Come on, let's get back to the house," he said, picking up the rucksack and taking Martha's arm.

"What about the berries?"

He looked into the part of the field where they'd left the containers. "They're buried in mud now. Let's go!"

They began to jog down the hill and over the soft, now slick, yellow grass, back toward the large house they'd been sharing.

"It's freezing!" Martha shouted. She was wearing shin-length trousers, a tank top, and no shoes.

"I know, I'm sorry," the Doctor said. "Let's hurry!"

They hastened, and when they reached the curb, Martha picked up her shoes from where she'd left them, put them on, and they ran through the streets back to C.J.'s house.

Once inside, they slammed the door and let out a relieved cry, both of them holding their arms far away from their bodies, standing watching the mud drop in clumps onto the floor. The Doctor dropped the soaking-wet rucksack onto the tile, followed by his suit jacket, shirt, tie, shoes and socks. Martha kicked off her sandals and wrung out her hair.

"Come on," he said, and began to sprint toward the stairs.

"I'll catch up," she told him.

He disappeared up the stairs and Martha bent, reverently unzipping the rucksack and gently extracting the purple journal. It was only slightly damaged, the bag itself being somewhat resistant to water. The pages were slightly wrinkled and poofy, but flipping through it very quickly as though she were shuffling cards, she found that there were no smears. She was relieved. Truly this journal had been the source of some profound pain for her, especially today, but she couldn't bear to think of the words and emotion within being lost to the ages forever.

She realised that she was leaving muddy fingerprints on the pages, so she closed it, and held the book away from herself as she followed the Doctor up the stairs.

On her way up, a bolt of thunder rang out across the sky, harshly cutting through the din of rainfall outside the house. She jumped a little, grabbing onto the bannister for support. And with that, she saw the light in the bathroom go out. The bedroom had no electric light, but the bathroom attached did; and now it was kaputt.

She went into the bedroom and found it quite steamy. The Doctor was in the bathroom, but she could barely see him. There were no windows in there, and even in the afternoon, especially with storm clouds, it was dark. He had the shower door open, and one arm stuck inside.

"Did the storm kill the electricity?"

"Looks like," he said. "The water's ready, come on."

"No, you go first, it's all right."

"Martha, you're filthy from head to toe – we both are. It's not like either of us is going to sit down and relax while the other one showers. What are you going to do, just _stand there_ until I'm finished? Come on." He held his hand out to her.

She opened her mouth to protest, but only achieved a stunned silence.

He sighed, and dropped his hand. "Martha, it's dark in here, and it's a large shower. Come on, you're shivering!"

He was right. They were both cold and dirty, and they were both adults. And good friends.

She set the journal on the bed, marched into the bathroom and shut the door behind her. It was now pitch dark, except for one little sliver of grey afternoon light shining under the door. She peeled off her clothes, and she could hear them go _glop_ as they hit the floor. She heard the Doctor's trousers and pants do the same.

She reached out into the dark. "Where are you?"

"Here," he said, blindly taking her wrist. He pulled her gently toward him, and after a moment, he put her hand against the jamb of the shower door. She was able then to feel her way inside, then pull the door closed.

She felt warm immediately. The water, the steam around her warmed her veins and made the cold leave through her pores. She couldn't feel any actual water touching her body, but the environment was steamy enough.

"You stand here," the Doctor said to her. She felt his hands close around her upper arms, and he moved her, positioning her under the stream of beautifully hot water. She felt caked-on clumps and layers of dirt washing away from her body, and she sighed loudly. She couldn't help it. The room was dark, and she'd lost sight. All she had at the moment was sensation, and this particular sensation was absolutely gorgeous.

She turned so that the water was pouring directly into her hair. She had fairly thick black tresses, and didn't trust that all of the dirt was getting rinsed out under this one stream of water. Having oily scalp was one thing – clumps of mud were a different matter altogether. Actual _dirt_ in her hair was a disgusting thought to her.

"I think I need to wash my hair about five or six times," she said. "Can you help me get the grit out?" She turned her back to him, and almost immediately felt his hands buried in her hair. He tugged gently, massaging her scalp, complemeting the hypnotic, calming effects of the water. It sent a shiver up her spine, in spite of the heat. Once again, she could not hold back from letting out the sounds of pleasure. She moaned a little, then did it again as his hands came back for another dive, then another exquisite tug.

He repeated it a few times, before leaning down toward her ear and saying, "Feels clean to me."

His voice, the whisper, the touch, it sent another shiver through her body, in the form of a wave of pure lust. She felt weak and hazy, and almost involuntarily, she leaned back against him, skin on skin, in the dark, under the water. "Oh, Doctor," she managed to hiss. "What are you trying to do to me?"

"Anything," he told her. "Just tell me."

She sighed with barely-concealed exasperation. His body felt amazing against hers, both of them slick and warm, and she distinctly felt the hardness forming against the small of her back. It was making her melt, making her crazy and unable to think.

Still, she hesitated. He had read a journal that she had clearly been concealing. True, it hadn't been hers, but he had _seen_ her hiding it, and did not get the clue. And as a result, he had the upper hand now.

Oh, but, running through the hospital hand-in-hand, flying off into the night... Sharing close quarters at Dolly Bailey's inn, feeling so lost and frightened in New New York, knowing he would come for her... Talking to a showgirl about his utter oblivousness, feeling gutted as she thought he was dumping her back at her flat, watching his face float away from her as she went adrift into the sun... it all came back to her. Moments in which she loved him, wanted him, ached to be with him as more than just a faithful companion and he had been painfully unavailable.

And she snapped.

She was still angry, she was suspecting of his motivations... but she was human. She was here, it was now. She owed it to herself, owed it to the girl-in-lust he'd picked up in that alley, and to the woman-in-love who had cared for him for three months in 1913, and for ten days in this house. She reckoned she'd be livid at herself no matter what choice she made, so she made the easy one, the incendiary one.

The one she really, really wanted.

A whisper came out, echoing through the falling water, bouncing off the glass walls. "Just put your hands on me."

His hands touched her hands lightly, then slid up her arms. He moved them inward toward her middle, stroking her stomach, feeling her muscles tense. His touch was electric, and she keened against him, throwing her head back to lean on his shoulder, making her whole body fit against his, like she was painted on. When his hands reached her ribcage, then slid up over her breasts, she almost lost all strength in her knees, and she moaned deeply, feeling a sure twitch against her back as his cock hardened further. If they had not been standing in total darkness, her vision would have blurred momentarily.

He slid both hands down once more, and his palms gripped her thighs. As he pulled his hands up over her body, from thighs to collar bone, he leaned down and kissed her neck just behind the earlobe. He nipped at the sensitive flesh there, licked it, whispered her name. She went weak again and moaned his name in return.

One hand cupped her breast, the other was edging its way back down. She was panting now, unable to entirely anticipate what he'd do next. She wanted him so badly, wanted him to touch her just perfectly, to take away the ache. She wanted them entrenched in one another, not just the water. But it wasn't a good idea. Some things could not be taken back, once done, and there was so much yet to work out.

Hs hand reached her abdomen, and showed no signs of stopping. He moved slowly, but it was more than obvious what he wanted. She was about to protest. _No, it's too soon, it's too much, it will change everything..._

"Martha," he whispered, then he bit her earlobe gently. "I love you."

She thought she was finished being surprised today, finished snapping and making decisions with her heart. But she wasn't finished.

She was stunned. And his fingers then slid down between her legs and into slick, waiting folds. He squeezed her nipple, and his other fingers danced over her clitoris – and she let them. She reached up and back with one hand and held onto the back of his neck for leverage as she sank deeper and deeper into pleasure. She felt her whole body pulsing and bending in rhythm with his fingers, her breathing came in rhythm as well. Shockwaves shot through her, more and more each time he stroked her, each time her desire was pushed to the edge and back.

She asked him to, but he never increased his speed. She begged him to, but he never pressed any harder. He kept a maddening, consistent beat, and before long, felt her begin to tremble violently in his arms. She shook and moaned, dug her fingernails into his thigh. She tried to squirm out of his grip, but he held her tight and whispered to her. This was the sweet torture that he loved most, the part where she just needs release, and he gives it to her in languorously small doses. She wanted more with every step; harder, faster, something...

Until she was just _there_. Her whole body jolted quite unexpectedly, and suddenly she found she was hurtling through orgasm, a million miles per hour, pervasive and explosive. He held on tight as she went through spasm after spasm, high cry after high cry, and finally, she let go.

She seemed to take a moment to catch her breath. Then he heard her say, "I'll be in the bedroom." But her tone was a harsh, not like a _bedroom voice, _and he was startled by it. He heard the shower door open, felt a draft, then heard it close.

She was in one of C.J.'s cotton robes, and was pacing when he emerged. She was stalking back and forth in a bedroom lit with the grey afternoon outside, and one lonely kerosene lamp.

"That was a dirty trick," she scolded. There was fire in her eyes, a totally different kind of fire.

"What was?"

"Saying that to me! How could you do that?" she asked, actually picking up a pillow and hurling at him. "Is it really that important for you to have the upper hand?"

"Excuse me?"

"You know if you said... that I'd let you..." she stopped speaking for a moment and gave a shuder. "And I did. I let you!"

Her face contorted into a look of disgust. Her eyes widened, as she suddenly seemed to realise the implications of what she had just done.

"Martha, no."

"Oh, God. Oh, God, I have to get out of here." She pushed past him and headed for the door.

"Please, stop," he called out, following her. "What are you doing?"

They were now in the hallway, and she turned and said. "Back up on the hill, I asked you to leave me alone. Can you please give me some time?"

"No. I'm afraid you'll do something rash. Now... hold on, okay?" he said, holding out his palms to her. "Just stand there. Don't move. I'll be right back."

She sighed and nodded, crossing her arms over her chest.

The Doctor disappeared into the bedroom, and when he came back, the purple journal was in his hands.

"Doctor, really? Now?"

"This is why I brought this with me on our little excursion today. There's something I want you to see."

"I've read it cover-to-cover."

"Perhaps, as of this morning. There are some new developments."

"What?"

"When you read it," he began. "When you read it, Martha, know that it came to light days and days ago in my sleep. Not five minutes ago in the shower."

"Why can't you just tell me?"

"I did. You said you thought it was a trick."

"Doctor..."

"Listen," he said, stopping her. "I became a contributing author this morning before we left. I'd intended it to be a kind of _revelation_ that we could share up on the hill with some fluddberries, but that didn't happen."

She sighed, and put all her weight on one hip.

He flipped through to a particular page, and handed the journal to her. "Just read. Then I'll leave you alone for as long as you like." He returned to the bedroom and shut the door softly.

She stared at the open book, both sides of the spine covered with hand-written text. On the left, C.J.'s tight writing in black, penned angrily at Haruka after Christmas one year, approximately twenty-five years earlier. After that, Martha's handwriting could be seen responding with her sentiments about the Doctor, lovely, loopy penmanship, red ink.

Below that, writing in blue ink, very boxy, clipped, all in caps. The Doctor had added to the purple journal angst, beginning with the phrase, _Dear Martha_...

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><p>Martha sat at the top of the stairs with her elbows resting on her knees. She could see the living room sprawled out in front of her on the other side of the bannister, and she stared at the plain white sofa. She had run the gamut of emotions, and now the panic had subsided, and she was simply calm.<p>

_Another note to self: getting what you want... scarier than you think._

It had been almost an hour. The Doctor had written no more than fifty words to express himself in the journal. He'd been uncharacteristically succinct in his phrasing, exacting and concise, so that there could be no question of his feelings or his intentions. He knew now what she wanted and needed. He was tired of being sensible, over-thinking, intellectualising everything. He wanted to feel with his heart and go the distance, whatever that meant.

Still, he was fairly certain that she was capable of reading more than one word per minute. So what was taking so long?

Of course, he knew the answer. He'd felt that way earlier when he'd read her entry to C.J. Knowing that she loved him had been devastating. Wonderful, but devastating. It had floored him. He'd locked himself away until he felt ready to take life by the horns again. He understood why she was staying away now... but he didn't like it.

So he opened the door.

He could see her bum and back, but not her head. She was sitting forward in such a way that most of her body was concealed.

"Martha."

"Mm?" she asked, without looking at him.

"Please come back in. We got our electricity back."

"I noticed."

"Not that it makes any difference in that room, except in the loo," he conceded.

She smiled slightly. "True."

There was a long silence. "Are you going to sit there the rest of the day, staring at the back of the sofa?"

"No."

"Then, here," he said holding out his hand.

She looked at it, but did not take it. "Then what?" she asked.

"I don't know," he answered. "But you sitting there, staring, being silent... it's making me nervous."

"So I go back in there with you," she said flatly, gesturing toward the bedroom.

"If you want."

"And... _then what_?" she asked, again.

"I don't know," he repeated, however, a little more emphatically.

She smiled again. It was soft, loving, sympathetic. "Yes, you do."

His expression didn't change. "I know what I want, but that's all."

"You can predict the future," she said. "Tell me what comes next."

"Nope," he told her. "This one is for _you_ to tell _me._"

She stood up, and never taking her eyes from his, she stepped forward and put her arms around his waist.


	15. Chapter 15

**And FOUR drafts later, here is chapter fifteen! I don't know why I'm having such a hard time with these gloopy scenes! Hope you enjoy it.**

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><p><span>FIFTEEN<span>

She gazed up at him, her arms tight around his middle. "Okay then. Tell me what I want to hear. And mean it."

His eyes were wide and stoic and serious. He stared at her unwaveringly and said, very very low, "I love you." It was definitive. Tears threatened her, and she looked away, too taken with the emotion of it. He took her by the chin and turned her face up to meet his eyes again. "Martha Jones, I'm in love with you. I have been blind and deaf and dumb to you, and I wish I could take it all back. You're brilliant and beautiful and I can't be without you. Can't. And I want _all_ of you. I want you to have all of me."

"Brilliant," she said, her voice cracking. She was trying to laugh, but a half-sob came out instead.

"I thought so," he responded, smirking.

"And time?" she asked, letting go of him. Only temporarily, she knew.

"Doesn't matter," he told her. "Whatever it brings us, or doesn't, I don't care. A hundred years, fifty years, twenty… two. Whatever time we're destined to have together, I want it. I want every minute of it."

"The loss?"

"Worth it."

"The risk?"

"Worth it."

"Dealing with my mum?"

His face twisted up in mock-contemplation. "Well, she's not the boss of me."

She chuckled. Then she stopped and grew serious.

"What about… you know."

"What?"

"You know," she said, averting her eyes. And then she muttered something, chewing on her lip, unintelligible to the Doctor.

"What, Martha?"

"That… girl. The other one. The one who used to travel with you."

"It's not about her."

"Not even a little bit?"

"Some things _are_ about her. This is not one of them. This is about us."

"It is _about us_. But I've always thought that. It has always seemed to me, though, that _you_ think it's about her."

"I'm sorry I've made you think that. But Martha, she's… I've been travelling, literally, for centuries, usually with someone else, very often with humans. She's hardly the only one. If I made every single new relationship ride on the coattails of the last one, well…"

"Then every new companion in your life would be miserable? Well, God forbid."

He sighed. "Sorry."

Martha sighed too. "Well… then, Doctor, at least will you talk about her someday properly, for God's sake, so I don't have to live with a ghost?"

"If you want me to. I'll do anything you want."

"Seriously. I want to hear the whole story someday."

"Okay."

She seemed to think for a moment, then, "What if I grow old?"

"You will. I don't care."

"Fifty years' time… it's like the snap of a finger to you. In the snap of a finger, I'll be seventy-five."

"But in fifty years, you'll still be Martha, and you'll still be beautiful. I, on the other hand, might regenerate _tomorrow_ and can make no such prediction as to still being anything like I am today."

"You should know, I've always been a terrible girlfriend."

"I've always been a terrible… well, I've done it all, and usually been terrible at it."

"I'm demanding."

"Hello? Have you met me?"

"Yeah, I have. And you're rubbish at following directions. Doesn't bode well for a demanding woman in your life."

"You'd be surprised how accommodating I can be when properly motivated," he said to her, with one naughty eyebrow crooked upwards.

"Cheeky."

"Besides," he said. "You're already in my life. You have been for a long time now. We are in each others' lives – there's no going back on that. The only question that remains is…"

She let the pause lapse. "What?"

"Well, what are we to each other?"

"That's a good question. That could take ages to answer."

"Yes, it could," the Doctor admitted. "We have, I guess, a lot to talk about."

"We do."

"I have a long past," he told her. "Nine hundred years is… oh, it's massive, Martha. I have a sad story to tell from the last few months before I met you… and dozens of sadder ones from lives and lives before that. Hundreds, maybe."

"I want to hear all of that. Plus, I have a few stories of my own," she confessed. "Not as many as you, and mine don't destroy planets or make the cosmos weep, but they're real to me."

"Of course they are. Everyone has that."

"Yes. And we really should know those things about each other before we… you know, carry this any further."

"Absolutely," he agreed, crossing his arms over his chest and nodding. "Us having a relationship… it's going to be complicated."

"Very," she told him, also nodding. She felt like a bobble-head doll. "Complicated and maybe a bit painful."

"It'll be a while before we can properly open up to one another," he said, looking at her with worried eyes.

"Yeah. It's really rather daunting." She was gazing back with the same worry.

"And then there's all the time I've spent with you, without realising my feelings. I didn't just wake from a dream with a new hitch in my chest. It's been incubating for a long time, and I haven't been open to it, for whatever reason."

"Interesting," Martha said, nodding again.

"It might be important to explore why. I mean, what was keeping me from you all this time? It can't just be… _her_, you know? It's probably an amalgamation of things compounding upon each other."

"Right," she added. "And we'll want to make sure that it doesn't happen again, so that we can move forward and be really, really _us_, you know?"

"Right. We have to give ourselves room to find out what _us_ means."

"Definitely."

"Daunting," he agreed. "I mean, by the time we get through all of that, you might actually _have_ grown old."

"Yeah." They both sighed heavily.

A pause ensued, and they were both leaning on something, arms crossed staring at the floor. They were both thinking of the hours and hours ahead of talking, hashing-out, difficult conversations in which they would both choose to be "the bigger person," by listening to stories of past lovers, old mistakes and dredging up painful memories. They were both thinking of how these conversations would be wedged in between sessions of dealing with the body in the basement, researching the plague, and the usual mundane conversations of everyday life. During this period, they would hold hands and steal glances at each other, flirt a bit, sleep in the same bed, and anticipate, anticipate, anticipate. Then they would eventually re-board the TARDIS, because neither of them could imagine that all of those issues could be solved in the relatively short time they were destined to be staying here in Ephraim's house, and then what? Continue to share a bed, or go back to square one? Perhaps quit sleeping completely?

Quit sleeping. That sounded quite realistic, actually.

And frankly, it all sounded positively exhausting. And the anticipation would surely kill them.

The Doctor's eyes slid from the floor to Martha's bare foot, up her leg, past the cinched waist of her robe, over the v-neck apexing between her breasts, and finally resting on her face.

She felt his gaze and looked up at him. Their eyes met. And in two seconds, their lips met. In fact, the entire fronts of their bodies met, and their tongues, all crashing together in a massive gesture that more embodied the _here and now_ than anything either of them had ever experienced. The hashing-out, the conversations, the past… all of that died when the two of them grabbed desperately onto each other.

Their kisses were punctuated by a few hard-earned guttural moans. The Doctor cradled Martha's head in the crook of his elbow as he leaned her to the side in a hungry gesture, an effort at devouring her. He swung her round and began pushing her back toward the bedroom. She lost her footing, and jumped up, wrapping her arms and legs round him.

"And talking?" he asked.

"This is a conversation for the ages, Doctor," she said, in-between sucking at his lips. "We could spend years working it out. And we will. But not tonight."

"Right. Good."

"At this moment we'd rather do other things, but it doesn't mean we won't communicate."

"Yes. You're very clever."

He stepped across the threshold into the bedroom with her, and put his knees on the bed. He fell forward onto his hands and she fell onto her back. "We can love and talk at the same time, can't we?" she asked.

He cocked an eyebrow.

She smiled. "Well, maybe not at the _exact _same time..."

"I get it, Martha. A relationship develops on two levels simultaneously: the intellectual and the physical," he said to her, so low as to be almost a whisper. Then he lowered himself down and began kissing her neck, and pulling back her robe to get at her collar bone. He continued speaking, in between kisses. "After months of talking and reading and looking through microscopes, connecting, learning... I'd say our physical relationship has a lot of catching up to do."

"Yeah. A lot," she sighed.

He tugged at the sash round her waist and pushed both hands inside her robe, round her middle. He laid open the lush terrycloth garment, and gazed upon her body, in the dim light, for the first time ever. It was certainly not his first moment of reflection upon Martha's beautiful shape, but he had certainly never seen her laid quite so bare before. He felt a frisson of pleasure rolling up his spine, and felt a very pleasant tightening between his legs.

This was a spur. He undid his own robe and threw it off as though it were chains, and leant down to plant a juicy kiss between her breasts. She gasped a little, and he could feel her body jolt. Then he did it again, one inch lower. His tongue emerged from his mouth and he traced a slow figure-eight that spanned widely onto the soft flesh of her breasts on either side. She shivered and jolted again, pushing against him, moaning his name.

He covered, it seemed, every inch of her body with his lips and tongue. He sailed over warm expanses of smooth skin begging to be touched and licked... stomach, hips, thighs, calves, toes, and back again. He teased her mercilessly; he did not respond to urging, and Martha's resolve went increasingly awry. He ignored gleefully every "please," and "give me", requests to use his fingers and tongue in places where she insisted she needed them, and this was causing her to unravel. By the time he had finished his work, the sun was nearly gone, and Martha was nearly insane. Her eyes could not focus, and she was not forming complete words anymore. Her body was in overdrive, on-edge and ready to explode.

And indeed, when he whispered her name and slid inside her, her legs folded automatically round his body, and she began immediately trembling, starting a steep, short climb. Her body was already vibrating round him as he pulled back and gave his second thrust, even deeper than the first. In almost no time, she was coming, and he could feel the pulsing inside, the shivering all over. He heard her lose and catch her breath with no effort.

But she wasn't finished, he could tell. Her body was back on the ascent – there was no time, nor space to slow down. This moment had been so long-awaited, so longed-for, this could not be over yet. She encouraged him to keep going, and he did. Though, he tried to go gently, give her the cathartic slow burn he'd been planning from the start, but he too was beginning to lose his resolve. She'd been begging for more, and he was finding that he wanted to give her everything she wanted.

He gritted his teeth, trying to hold back, and tried to enjoy the torture. But when she reached up and ran both hands through his hair, cradled his head and whispered, "Just fuck me good. You know you want to... you have to..." he lost it. He gritted harder, focused on her infernal eyes and lips with a kind of wild hunger, and began driving into her, pounding with abandon. His elbows were braced near her head and his fingers were clawing at the comforter.

The whole bed quaked beneath them. Amid the squeaks from the frame and the entire piece of furniture banging against the wall, there were high-pitched cries, groans, and expletives galore. Martha Jones had a bit of a filthy mouth when she was this far gone, and it gave him so much pleasure to hear. In fact, it drove him mad. And, with one swift, guttural word, and her head thrown back, she came again. He wasn't able to keep himself in check anymore when that happened, and he followed behind, released inside of her before she was even finished herself.

* * *

><p>It was dark, but the lantern was on. They lay together for a long while, watching the shadows dancing on the wall, and nothing was said. At last, Martha asked the question that all women eventually ask when the silence goes on for too long: "What are you thinking?"<p>

He smiled, inhaled hard and stroked her arm. "We were saying a little while ago that we needed to give ourselves the opportunity to find out what _us_ is. You and me as a unit, who are we?"

"Yes, we were saying that."

"I was just thinking... we just took a very big step toward answering that question."

"We did," she said, her voice soft and high, her stomach tightening with nervousness. What was he going to say now?

"I think I'm really going to like us."

Their conversation led them into loving banter about the future, butterflies and rainbows and shared stories. This led to innuendo. Innuendo led to kisses and wandering hands. Wandering hands led them to test out the squeaking quality of the bed frame once more. The squeaking led them, annoyed but laughing, to the floor. The Doctor knew he'd have rug burns on his knees in the morning, but if there ever was an injury that would be worth it...

And once again, he found himself lying with Martha's head on his shoulder, except this time, they were on the carpet, positively tangled in the bedspread they'd pulled down, and she was fast asleep.

He was not so lucky. Sleep was not forthcoming. Too many questions, too few answers. When he and Martha had gone off and running in the hallway and wound up in the bedroom, he'd thought the answers didn't matter for the moment. But now that his _brain_ was back in charge, he was back to being his old, contemplative, cerebral self. How irritating.

But this was scary business, this. And only one thing was going to take his mind off being in love and uncertain.

"Martha," he whispered, jostling her a little.

"Mmm..." she groaned.

"I'm going to go downstairs."

"Kay. Bye." But she made no move to reposition herself so he could get up.

He slipped out from underneath her, grabbed his robe and stood up.

He tried waking her again. He didn't like the idea of leaving her on the floor. If they were lying there in a blissful fog together it was one thing. Walking away from her on the floor alone was quite another.

She wouldn't wake, so he just untangled her, lifted her and put her back in bed, then replaced the covers.

He had no idea what the hell he was going to do downstairs, but it was better than lying in the semi-dark, waiting for morning and torturing himself on the inside.


	16. Chapter 16

SIXTEEN

The Doctor hadn't communed with C.J. Ephraim since before falling ill. As he walked down the stairs to the living room, he quite fancied the idea of re-famliarising himself with the lab in the basement, and saying hello, as it were, to the late owner of the house. If nothing else, he reckoned that tomorrow, they'd be back with their noses to the grindstone, trying to work out how to help Lincomb back on Sorofrann, and it wouldn't hurt to be ready.

But that was rubbish, and even he knew it. The truth was, he felt a connection with C.J. Especially now. They had got to know the man from living in his house, and studied a bit of his physiology and his psychology as well. But over and above all of that (or perhaps inextricably linked with all of that), his sad love story had become the catalyst for the Doctor and Martha. The Doctor felt the need to thank him. Or something. Perhaps.

He felt that the illness, the journal, Ephraim himself, somehow it had all been planted as a way to lead him to what he truly wanted and needed. In his rational mind, he knew that it was probably absurd to think so. Logically, he knew that the hand of time and the cosmos had better things to do than to make sure the Doctor got a shot at the pretty girl. But something in his Time Lord gut told him that there was a swirly time thing happening here. Now that he was in his right mind, dry, healthy, and not blind with lust, he could feel it. Time was folding or crumbling or... he just couldn't identify how or why yet.

He made his way into the cellar and flipped on the lights in the lab. Fluorescents filled up the space and impeded his eyesight for a split second. C.J. Ephraim was lying on the slab, right where he'd been left. The Doctor smiled at him and said _good evening_, then began to circle round the remains.

He noticed a few petrie dishes lying near the body, with desiccated fingernail and hair samples that Martha had taken. She had used the fabric softener on some of the tissue to rehydrate and manipulate it. She had also tried using water and ruccosamine (a plasma-mimicking chemical, not available on Earth in her time) to reconstitute some dried blood. The clever, clever girl. He saw that she had made microscope slides out of some of the lower-layer skin samples, and had dyed them various colours in order study the cellular mutations. Some notebooks were lying nearby with both Martha's and C.J.'s handwriting in them, notes made about the virus, chemical reactions and whatnot. Some of them were dialogues, with questions posed by C.J., and full or partial answers found by Martha, and questions of her own. From what the Doctor could tell, Martha, with C.J.'s help, had learnt quite a lot about the virus in its various incarnations, but her research was going in the wrong direction. She hadn't got close to isolating the enzyme, nor even working out that there was an enzyme to identify. Martha Jones had a monstrous intellect, and was going to make an excellent doctor someday, but she did not have experience with this type of lab research, and she did not have experience with Time Lord physiology…

And presumably, neither did C.J., bless him. But what did that have to do with anything?

The Doctor looked around and marvelled. It had taken _all three_ of them to beat this thing. He smiled with a _thank you_ to Mr. Ephraim for starting all of this, and giving Martha the stepping-stones to help save his life.

Along a side table, the Doctor saw piles and piles of papers, pages torn out of journals and put in categories. It was the work that the two of them had started just after he'd got sick. One pile, he could see, was all about a certain virus strain that Ephraim had found turning up in a particular part of the city, attacking only children. That research was unfinished – the children had died too quickly. The next pile was from a year later, discussing the possible link between the children's strain and another, on the other side of the planet, which had possibly gone airborne and mutated as a result of a particularly strong pollen in the air, at various points in-between.

The next pile was related, and the next and the next. He could see a continuum of research topics, all relating back to this, the thing that his friend Lincomb back on Sorofrann had called _Malatia Incognita_, the unknown disease. Unknown indeed. Even within the same pile, the Doctor could see different types of paper of different qualities and sizes. Given the fact that C.J. only worked out of one journal at a time, he could now see how truly difficult a job C.J. had had, and why a cure hadn't been found in his time. The strains of the virus were popping up all over the place, all the time, and he'd get snippets here, and snippets there. Occasionally, there was an indication that Ephraim could see the big picture, the web of mutation and a pattern… but then something would occur and it would all fall apart again. Not even the universe's greatest Researcher could get past a virus like this one. Especially without the benefit of space travel, if the thing was so prolific as to have reached out to Sorofrann as many as fifty-eight years before.

The last pile, way over to the right, was the thickest. Again, it was made up of various types of paper of different thicknesses, slightly different colours, slightly different-sized rule. A quick glance told him that these were personal notes, pieces of the memoir. He wondered how often Martha had got distracted by reading about C.J.'s life over the week and a half while the Doctor was sick.

The top page read, _"...and aunt said goodbye to me and left, and there I was, first day at university, eighteen years old, scared stiff. Part of my apprehension came from not knowing with whom I'd be sharing a room. I'd spent most of the last five years being, in some ways, very sheltered. I had been having family dinners with my surrogate parents and my four cousins, not in a dining hall. I'd been sharing the same bedroom with my little cousin Roger who idolised me. Now, who the hell knew what I'd get? _

"_Meeting Steve Alderson completely unravelled my nervousness. Sure, he was six-foot-four and broad as a long-haul lorry, but he was also one of the most charismatic, congenial, and downright gentle people I had ever met. He played rugby..."_

The Doctor smiled and looked at the next page.

"_...because normal kids want to be rock stars and professional athletes, but no, not me, no sir. Kidneys. They were the thing for me! Nephrology was my first goal, though at some point I switched to astrophysics. That must have been..."_

Again, the Doctor smirked a bit and turned the page.

"_My father was a good man. A very, very good man. Almost unfathomably good. And also unfathomably flawed. He had the weight of worlds on his shoulders, the fate of civilisations (including his own), and the Mandala of existence."_

"There it is again," the Doctor whispered to himself. "C.J. Ephraim, who the _hell_ are you?"

"_I've mentioned before that my early upbringing was slightly on the unstable side, always running, always travelling, putting out fires... my father was the catalyst for all of that. As such, he was distracted a lot of the time. He never, ever ignored me exactly, but he'd speak to me, even as a child, as though he were speaking to an aerospace engineer. He had a machine-gun-like language that was almost all his own. My mother was better at sifting through the jargon than I was, but then again, I wasn't with them for very long. I suppose that if I'd been able to commune with him as an adult, I would have been more equipped to deal with his ramblings, and help out more. As it was, I always felt useless. They tried consciously to keep me out of the fray, but I didn't like that. If my parents were going to save a planet from a despotic ruler, I wanted to help! If they were going to fly into battle and shoot a galactic cruiser out of the sky which was flinging poison in the atmosphere of a neighbouring planet, I wanted to pull a trigger! But so often, I could not, and I attempted to console myself with the knowledge that someday, when I was bigger and smarter, I could help mum and dad save the universe. Alas, I never got very big while I was..."_

The page ended. At the same time as the Doctor grew frustrated that this leg of the story ended there, a sinking feeling crept into the pit of his stomach. He turned and looked at the body lying on the slab. He was wide-eyed, but didn't say anything. Within ten seconds, he found that he couldn't bear to look anymore, and he turned his attention back to the pile of papers that constituted C.J. Ephraim's personal life. He dove in and looked for more information about the parents.

He finally ran across another page that began with the words, "My father."

"_My father taught me so much – some of it was intentional, some of it wasn't. Until I was thirteen, he was the only teacher I ever had. My mother worried that I wouldn't be socialised enough because I never went to school, but I never understood that. I had them, what more did I need? And who in this great universe of ours could possibly teach me more than he could? I knew that no schoolteacher could love me more, could care more about my development. I remember that he used to kiss me on the top of the head sometimes when I did something right, even if it was just something easy or small, like conjugate a verb in Latin. But I used to feel so warm and safe when he did that, like this life, his love, was all I would ever need._

"_My mother was the light of my life – of both our lives. When I was perhaps a year old, we settled down briefly in order for her to finish medical school. And yes, she became a doctor, and she practised internal medicine off-and-on for the next few years, between journeys, between dealing with me and the matters of the cosmos. But she was more an adventurer than anything else, and eventually, her medical degree became superfluous. One day, she'd just had it with the NHS and never went back to it. She could have been, and according to my father, WAS brilliant, even without it._

"_Memories of my parents make me smile – they are overwhelmingly positive. Though, I do have the odd memory of being punished. Usually it was because I tried to get involved in something dangerous, leaving our ship when I shouldn't have, when my parents were involved in some interplanetary crisis. For that, one or the other of them would march me to my room, give me a good talking to, and forbid me from coming out for the next several hours. As I got a little bit older, and certain revelations began to come into my head, my father punished me for what I now realise was talking down to my mother, lording my uniqueness over her, implying that I was better than she. That is painful to think of. It would have had to have been so close to the time when we would part ways for good, and it's terrible knowing that this was how we spent large parts of the end of our..."_

The Doctor's hearts were now beating a million miles per hour. He went through more of the papers, stories about cousins, visiting Paris with friends, a watered-down version of the Haruka saga. His hands shook, and some of the papers fell to the floor, until finally, he found more of what he was looking for.

"_...has always been the 'bad luck' number, where I come from. And indeed, thirteen was the age I was when my parents left me. I remember them both trying to put a positive spin on the situation, saying they would be back as soon as possible, trying to hide their grief and fear. My father sat me down on the front steps of my aunt and uncle's house, and delivered a set of instructions, his voice shaking as though he would crack at any second. I was never to try to contact them until they contacted me. I was not to tell anyone, especially my aunt and uncle and grandparents, about a certain adventure we'd had, involving a certain particularly nasty character. I was to do as I was told, be clever, be loyal, be a good friend, be my own person. Then he gave me a yellow envelope containing what he called 'the roots of the TFP project,' which I was not to open or try to investigate until I felt that there was no other recourse in my studies. He said I would know when that was. Indeed I did; when I reached a dead-end studying the virus dubbed _Malatia Incognita, _somehow, I knew. And the information in that envelope, which I been given at thirteen, helped me immensely at age forty-six. It was my last connection to my father. I'm not entirely certain how he came upon that seed of knowledge, but I have my guesses._

Tears came to the Doctor's eyes. He glanced at the body, then continued reading.

"_I remember my mother only saying goodbye to me, telling me she'd love me, and be with me, for longer than I'd ever know. She was holding my head in both hands and weeping into my hair. She was only five-foot-two, but I was small. My father urged her away, and she stepped back from me and tried to smile. I regret that my final and strongest memory of such a beautiful woman should be of her eyes puffy and red, her hair straggly from neglect and worry, and her face streaked with tears. And I guess it goes without saying that they never came back, though I've been assured over and over that they had every intention. I don't know what became of them, and I've tried not to guess. Guessing will only lead me to a place where I don't want to go. In the natural course of things, realistically, given my age and her lifestyle, my mother is probably gone by now. If not, she is certainly very old, and possibly incapacitated from bone fatigue or something. My father is a different story. I reckon he's probably still out there somewhere, probably still travelling, probably still in that same old ship. He's like a reptile who sheds his skin from time to time. Even if I saw him, I'd probably never recognise him. And even if I saw him again and did recognise him as the man I remember, he'd look a lot younger than me, and our rapport would be..."_

The Doctor let out an actual cry of frustration. His rifling through the memoir pile had become desperate and violent.

"_...they were strong but gentle people, and I'll always be grateful to them for everything they did after my parents left. They had four children of their own, and yet always treated me like I belonged, like I was one of them. I never felt unloved or unwanted with them, and any awkwardness I may have experienced stemmed from my own issues. They sacrificed a lot so that I could have a normal, nice life. They sent me to school for the first time, and cared enough to punish me with when I got into trouble for correcting the teacher. They sent me to university and helped me get my Ph.D. They even helped me duck the British authorities when someone in government found out who I was, and I tried (and ultimately succeeded in) leaving the planet._

"_My aunt talked to me a lot about my parents – she had been my mother's sister. I reckon she was trying to bridge the gap between my time with mum and dad, and the rest of my life. She told me about the first time she, my aunt, met my father, at a bizarre little party in London. She recalled being scared spitless, in a story that sounded pretty much par-for-the-course in the life of my parents: chaos ensued, mum and dad saved the day. And my grandmother smacked my dad around a bit, though later she always denied having done that! My aunt instilled in me a very strong sense that my mother and father were great people who loved me very much. Of course, I didn't need to be told that necessarily, but adolescence is a strange time, an impressionable time. Doubt can creep in out of nowhere, and longing and loneliness are always just around the corner. My aunt made sure that they would never overtake me."_

The Doctor realised he was panting. He took all the relevant pages and set them aside. He wasn't yet sure what he would do with them, he just knew that he needed to relax, and to do that, he needed to quit reading.

But there was one more thing that caught his eye.

_"...is, in fact, non-linear. Cause-to-effect does not work in the way that people think. It goes sideways and back and forth, sometimes it's circular. This is because time is actually very fluid, and manipulable, if you're the right sort of person. Or not a person at all. I close my eyes, and I can see. People talk about the butterfly flapping its wings in San Francisco and causing a bridge to collapse in Beijing. This is the way of the universe. When I see a child crying, a dog crossing the street, a raindrop falling... sometimes I can see that it is just what it is. Sometimes a child just cries. But other times, and these are the times that chill me to the bone, I can see without question that that child will uproot the world with her pain, or that that dog will be hit by a car and cause a chain reaction that destroys something precious as we know it. It's a huge burden. It's not a premonition or seeing into the future. It's a kind of thread that runs through existence and links one event to the next. And that thread runs through me. I inherited it from my father. I cannot shake it, and sometimes I cannot handle it. I just have it - it's in my gut. Certain events in time and space are fixed, important to the survival of the universe, and they must be. Must BE. And I can see them..."_

He pulled one hand down over his face, and uttered an expletive. He now realised that Martha had _not _got distracted reading this stuff - if she had, she'd have the same feeling that he now had, and she would surely have said something.

And suddenly, a bee came into his bonnet. Where did the Figlozine come from, that enzyme that attracted the virus within Ephraim's system, and within the Doctor's? In Time Lords, it's a binding agent in the heart muscles, something that stimulates the binary vascular system and keeps it running. It has other functions for other types of beings.

The Doctor moved over to the slides and petrie dishes Martha had prepared. He'd start with these samples, and try to find the origin of the enzyme in C.J.'s half non-human body.

Deep down, he knew what he'd find, but he went for it anyway. He prayed silently that his life hadn't just become as complicated as he thought.


	17. Chapter 17

**Fair warning: smut alert. However, it does have a purpose. Or rather, it doesn't...**

* * *

><p><span>SEVENTEEN<span>

_There was a lot of light. The Doctor was surrounded by it. A man was standing in front of him, speaking in low tones, with a voice that sounded much like his own, only a bit deeper. The man was as tall and thin as he was. He wore a pair of tan trousers, a yellow button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his forearms and an argyle sweater-vest. He was a black man, but relatively light-skinned, and good-looking. He was middle-aged, but he had what one might call an eternally-youthful appearance. He had eyes that were dark like black ink, penetrating, liquid, beautiful, and utterly familiar to the Doctor._

_The man opened his mouth and said, "__I know better than almost anyone how cause-to-effect works. Therefore, I know that my life didn't begin the day I was born. The wheels of my existence have been turning for much longer than I can or should describe."_

"_Indeed," said the Doctor, looking round the lab._

"_But my feel for the workings of the universe have made me a little claustrophobic."_

"_I'm sorry," the Doctor replied. Then he turned around and saw a desiccated corpse on the slab behind him. He recognized the words he was hearing from the tall man, and wondered if he had perhaps heard them before, or seen them in writing._

_The man continued to talk. "Both of my parents were doctors, and my father had had children before," he said, looking at the Doctor with an almost apologetic empathy. _

"_I'm sorry that you'll never know them. They'll never know you."_

"_I am The Researcher, I am, as yet, perfectly healthy as a result of my unique genetic makeup, and my studies in this, my father's TFP project…"_

"_This is not my project," the Doctor told him, interrupting. "It's yours. I wouldn't have been able to…"_

"_Doctor?" said a voice from outside._

_The man and the Doctor both averted their eyes in the direction of the voice. It was a woman's voice._

_The man smiled sweetly. "She's calling you. You'd better wake up."_

_The Doctor nodded. "She loves you. She doesn't know it yet, but she does."_

"_I can see that. Just protect her, will you?"_

"_Always."_

"_Doctor?" the voice said again. "Hello? Are you in there?"_

* * *

><p>"Yeah," the Doctor said, as he sat up with a start. He'd fallen asleep with his head on the metal slab where C.J. Ephraim's body lay. He looked up, and Martha was there, looking down at him with an amused smile. "Hi."<p>

The smile he had just seen in his dream came back to him. The two were remarkably similar, and the Doctor caught a chill.

"Hi. What are you doing down here?" she wanted to know.

"Couldn't sleep," he said, rubbing his eyes. "What time is it?"

"Eight. When did you come down?"

"I don't know. Right after we…" he said. She smiled. "Right after."

She blushed, and he pushed a strand of hair out of her face.

"Did you learn anything new about our friend here overnight?" she asked, patting Ephraim's dried-up hand with her own.

The Doctor gulped. "Yes."

"Well?"

He had absolutely no idea what to say to her. He could have diverted her attentions by suggestively telling her that he'd rather discuss what he'd learned about _her _overnight, but all of these things now seemed inextricably linked, as C.J. would say, by the Mandala of existence. He wondered whether C.J. ever saw this in his mind's eye – this time the Doctor and Martha had spent in his home, becoming a couple, becoming the people that C.J. would grow to love. He could not discuss their lovemaking as an isolated occurrence now, knowing the circular path it would take.

And the details of C.J.'s life, he was now realising, somehow for the first time, was information they were not meant to have. Especially Martha.

"Martha, how much of C.J.'s memoir did you read over the past couple weeks, while I was laid up?"

"Not much," she said. "Couldn't concentrate. I knew I needed to find a way to help you."

"Mm, good. I think…" he trailed off. He continued staring up at her, she with her arms crossed, face serious.

She waited expectantly for him to finish.

At last, he said, "I'm feeling a bit… I don't know, weighed down."

"Really?" she asked, a little afraid of the next part of the conversation.

"Well, not weighed down, exactly, but… I feel like something is driving me out into the sunlight," he said. He stood up and hugged her. "I don't want to be in this basement right now. I know we just went out yesterday, but…"

"Oh. Okay." He pulled back and looked at her, keeping his hands on her arms. To his relief, she was smiling. "Where do you want to be?"

He smiled. "I don't know. I'm in love, but I feel encumbered by death. It's… it's messing with me. And I'm not ready for C.J. to take over our lives right now. I just think… in light of certain new developments… in light of _us_," he said. "We need to get out of here. Have some time just for you and me. Like a honeymoon or something."

She smiled even wider. "A honeymoon?"

"Sort of. We're not in a big hurry to get to Lincomb. Let's just explore the planet. See if we can find a lovely place to stay for a bit. Get to know each other."

"I already know you pretty well, Doctor," she said, batting her eyelashes. "What ever could you mean?"

"You'll just have to see if there's something else for you to find out," he said, fluttering his brows. "Perhaps lots of somethings."

"Okay," she said, shrugging. "Are you sure about this?"

"I'm sure. Four days, and then we'll go back to Sorofrann and get a sample so we can isolate another enzyme and try to help Lincomb. Deal?"

"Sure! Do you want to go now?"

"Yeah. Why don't you pack up some things, and we'll go and find the TARDIS. She'll have been missing us."

She nodded, smiled, threw her arms around the Doctor's neck and kissed him, then bounded upstairs. He heard her moving about up there, and fired up the computer, opening the biological profiling software. He pulled up the file he'd saved before falling asleep.

"Origin of Figlozine 9," said the results. "Refer to subject's cardiac organs."

And then he crossed back to C.J.'s corpse. He knew what he'd found and what it meant, but he _had_ to double-check. He pulled back the sheet he'd used to cover the work he'd done.

Overnight, he had used a bone saw to incise the sternum and had pulled the chest apart. He'd found muscle markers that indicated C.J. Ephraim's dual hearts, and the skin flaps within the dried-up lungs that indicated a respiratory bypass system.

He covered the body again with the sheet, and for the first time, he covered the face as well. And after years of being alone in the world, of losing and gaining, pain and love and explosions and worlds colliding, the Doctor sat down, buried his face in his hands, and wept.

* * *

><p>Fortunately, Martha had decided to have a shower before leaving, which had given the Doctor a bit of extra time to pull himself together. He internally scolded his sadness over and over again before going upstairs to the main floor, reminding himself that he needed to be in high spirits when he spent this time with Martha. He had decided last night that she didn't need to know about any of this, that it would only upset her and upset the flow of time anyhow. He was used to carrying the burden of the future alone, why should now be any different?<p>

They set out, each back in their own clothes, hand-in-hand through Fontana's city centre, and found the TARDIS outside the city limits. It groaned at them when they entered, and the Doctor said, "Hey, language!"

"What?" asked Martha.

"She knows about us," he said, smiling. "She's just made a rude innuendo."

He pulled the screen toward him and sat down, and began to do some sort of data-processing function. She came round and draped her arms around his neck. "What are you doing?"

"Scanning the planet," he told her. "Seeing what's out there. Maybe there's something we can visit."

She kissed his ear, his cheek, his neck, his hair, his eye, and then started all over. When something went _ping_, she stopped and looked at the screen.

"I know where we should go," said the Doctor.

"Okay. I'll go anywhere with you."

He smiled and threw some switches, moving the TARDIS to another position on the same planet.

* * *

><p>When they stepped outside, Martha saw on her right what looked like a burned-out hot tub. On her left, something similar, except it was elevated. On three sides, there was what looked like a bamboo railing, beyond which, blue ocean crashed against rocks below. She could tell that they were in some sort of cabana perched high on a cliff.<p>

"Where are we?"

"Arilivo Rejuvenation Resort," he told her. "It's all automated. I can get the whole place running with the sonic screwdriver. Just name your pleasure!"

She chose first, and within the hour, they had two functions ready for use. They used the elevated tubs to take a soothing, fortified, bubbling mud bath. The water and dirt had been infused with Fludd berry juice, which was supposed to help open the pores. Then they both stepped, coated with mud, into the hot tub, which filtered out all of the dirt in forty-five seconds, and left only a crystal-clear green sheen in the water. They snuggled in all cosy and naked, and snogged scandalously in the water.

Then, once again, they climbed into terrycloth robes, and went back inside the TARDIS for something to eat.

After lunch, it was his choice. They wandered through the resort and found a Japanese-themed massage room, also with a railing looking out onto a beach, which caught his fancy. While the Doctor stood and churned a special blend of oils, Martha paced back and forth with anticipation, and her fingers ached and twitched – she was dying to get her hands on him properly. He disrobed and lay down, face-down, and she very patiently used the oils (and her rather extensive knowledge of humanoid musculature) to work him into a relaxed stupor over the next hour.

At last, she leant down and said, "Turn over."

He did, and now he lay on his back.

Her manipulations had given him, it would seem, quite a lot of pleasure, and his excitement was readily apparent. She was not surprised to find this, but she was delighted, because she was experiencing the same pleasure. She had been growing warmer and warmer over the last hour of running her hands all over his body. She was feeling slick between the legs and feeling urgent in the veins.

She smiled down at him and shrugged off her robe. She put one knee upon the massage table, and then the other, then swung one leg over, so she was straddling his middle. She leaned down, resting on her elbows and groaned as she hungrily plunged her tongue into his mouth and they sucked at each other, as though saying a lusty hello after having been separated for far too long. She buried her hands in his hair and tugged, which seemed to drive him mad, and he ran his hands up and down her bum, feeling the soft, warm skin, glide beneath his own.

She sat up, braced one hand on his shoulder, and reached back, grasping his member. Her black eyes dug into his as she shifted her weight and positioned him at her entrance. She braced the other hand on his other shoulder and her breathing grew hard and intense as she got ready to rock back…

His hearts were racing, his body was trembling with anticipation, and he could see the hunger in her eyes. He could feel the lust pounding against the inside of her skin. But then she smiled momentarily, a reminder from a dream came into his mind, and something happened…

Suddenly, the Doctor was nervous. Suddenly, it didn't feel right. It wasn't a Time Lord's knowing sensation that the continuum was being interrupted – quite the contrary. This act was important and necessary, and that made it really bloody frightening.

_Not ready yet! Not ready!_

He grasped her arms and stopped her at the last millisecond. She looked at him questioningly, and he gave a raspy, desperate whisper, "Use your mouth."

For a moment, she seemed a bit stunned, but then that melted away, and she gave him an evil little smile, one that told him she liked what she heard. She repositioned herself and slid backwards, kneeling between his legs. She gave his long, hard shaft a long, hard lick from base to tip, and took a great deal of satisfaction in listening to him groan. She giggled a little as she closed her mouth over him, and the head hit the back of the throat. She wanted him inside her, yes, but being this close, taking in the scent, giving him this pleasure, anticipating the release… this would do for now.

* * *

><p>Martha was left on the edge of sanity. She marvelled at how even when she <em>had<em> the Doctor in her clutches, he still had a way of making her want.

But he didn't leave her in that state very long. She had given him a fantastic catharsis, and he was not blind to her needs: she needed a little of the same. He got up off the table as soon as he was sure that his knees would not give out, and he helped her up onto it in his place. She never took her eyes of him, nor was she able to control her breathing. She was shaking with need, sitting up straight with her legs hanging down, feet not quite touching the floor. He parted her thighs and she held her breath for the onslaught. To her surprise, he knelt. But the surprise melted away and was replaced by a mass of undefined, clouded, blinding pleasures, and in just a few minutes, his lips and tongue had brought her over the edge twice, thus quelling her immediate desire…

She wondered briefly as she flopped backwards, panting with exhaustion, onto the massage table, why, for some reason, twice she had been poised to take him inside, and twice he had thwarted her. Granted, it was explosively pleasurable, but she was in love, and this was new. She didn't just want climaxes – that was just a really nice side-effect. She wanted to consume. She needed to feel him grab her and take her and want her and love her with his whole body and voice and soul. She needed to be filled with him, to have a part of him inside.

And she told him so, after a stint lying in the sauna and groping one another in the lavender-oil shower, once they found their way breathlessly to the resort's "honeymoon suite."

His response was to growl in her ear, bite her neck and throw her onto the bed. A fresh wave of lust came over her.

_Oh, yes - THIS is what I need_, she told herself.

He tore open her robe and pushed two fingers eagerly between her folds, and found a hard little bud needing attention. He massaged it and watched her writhe. She begged again to be filled, and so he thrust three fingers inside, working them back and forth, reducing her to inarticulate gasps, and with his thumb, he finished her off. She spasmed like mad, arching her back off the bed and crying out loud.

But as she came down from the high, a doubt set in. She had _begged _him… and he had implicitly refused. She was now sure that he was avoiding giving her what she wanted. Whether it was a power thing or a fear thing, she had no idea, but it was making her nervous. And a little upset.

He lay on his side beside her and took her hand. He guided it to his shaft, now magenta-coloured and positively screaming at him from between his legs. He began to show her how to stroke him, but she took her hand away.

He let out a little groan of protest. Then he rasped, "What's the matter?"

"You know what's the matter," she said calmly, sitting up. "You know what I want."

He lay on his back and let out another groan. "Oh, Martha. I… oh, believe me, I want to. I'd love to! Right now and for hours. But I can't."

"Why not?"

"I can't say."

"You said you wanted all of me, and for me to have all of you. Right now, we're getting snippets. I feel like a high-schooler under the bleachers."

"But hasn't it felt amazing?" he asked. "It's felt bloody amazing to me!"

"Yes, but just giving each other lots of orgasms… it's not giving each other _all_. I want you to look into my eyes and tell me you love me, and be inside me and…" she stopped, choked. "We'll have plenty of time for all this cute stuff later. Right now, I just want _you. _Are you just teasing me, or what?"

"No, I swear, I'm not."

"Then _what_?"

"I… just can't…"

"Then, neither can I."

She got up, pulled her robe on, and left the room.


	18. Chapter 18

EIGHTEEN

Martha was lying in her own bed in the TARDIS, in a set of her favourite purple pyjamas, asleep. She was still in the same position into which she had retreated after leaving the Doctor in the suite.

She awoke because she heard the grinding of the great vessel's gears, and could tell that it was moving. When it stopped, she heard footsteps, followed by her bedroom door opening.

"Good morning," the Doctor said.

"Did you stay in the suite?" she asked, turning over to look at him.

"Yeah. For a little while, I was too paralyzed to move. Then eventually I just fell asleep."

"Serves you right," she told him softly.

"I know. I don't blame you for being angry with me."

"I don't think I _am_ angry with you."

"No?"

"No. I'm just sad. Really, really sad."

"Why?"

She sat up. "Because we came so close! Listen, Doctor, I believe that you have a legitimate reason for keeping things from me," she said. "But that being the case, I don't think we should be sleeping together, or doing anything else more intimate than sharing a soda. And that's not an ultimatum. It's just the way things are."

"Really?"

"Yes. If I can't have all of you, then I'll just settle for nothing."

"Wow."

"I was thinking about it last night. We said the other day that we were going to work out all of our relationship issues in the months and years to come, talk about why it took us so long, and our pasts and… that's all very well and good, but that's just about us. It's about me, just a woman, and you, just a guy. But you're not just a guy, you're a Time Lord too – a Time Lord first. I know that you have cosmic secrets and the whole of time and space to protect. There's nothing you can do about that – it's who and what you are. And if that means that you'll never be able to give yourself to me, I understand. So be it. But we're not going to be fuck buddies or whatever. I love you too much for that."

"Am I hearing you right? Are you breaking up with me?"

"Maybe. Yeah."

"After two days?"

She folded her hands in her lap and stared down at them sadly.

He sighed and leaned against the doorjamb. They were quiet for a minute, and then the Doctor said, "Well, in that case, Martha, why don't you get dressed and come out to the console room. I moved us, then came in here so that I could show you something."

"What is it?" she asked, standing up.

He sighed heavily. "I'm hoping it will change your mind. In fact, I'm actually quite confident that it will."

"Oh yes?" she asked, sceptically. She didn't doubt that something could bring her back round to wanting to be in a relationship with him again, but she did doubt, based on past experience, that he'd ever go in for full disclosure. She realised last night that she'd been quite naïve to think that he ever would, even if _he_ thought he would.

"Yes. But Martha," he said gravely, walking toward her. He put his hands on her shoulders and held tight, looking her dead in the eyes. "It's going to shake you up. It will be upsetting and difficult and you need to be absolutely sure that you're ready for it."

"Doctor, I'm not a child."

"I'm not talking about death or destruction or genocide. This isn't a Dalek attack or a malevolent sun. Martha, this will literally change life as we know it. Our world will turn upside down, and there will be no going back."

"Whatever it is, I can handle it," she said, her eyes growing worried.

He let go of her, and started walking around the room. "I'm equipped to deal with things like this, it's in my blood. Knowing things we shouldn't – it's what Time Lords do. Keeping the secrets of the universe… it's literally a course at the Academy. But this… Martha…" he tugged wildly at his hair. "…oooh, you have no idea… this is…"

"Jesus, Doctor."

"Martha… I want to tell you. I do. I want to tell you so you'll trust me, and so you'll see why we should be together – why we _have_ to be together. And also why I was reluctant to… last night."

"Okay."

"But I also want to tell you because for the first time in my life, I actually have a secret that's too big for me. Being the only one who knows it… I can't take it."

"Then tell me. What are you waiting for?"

He stopped and stared at her. He was so agitated now, he was panting. "I'm waiting for the nerve."

"All right," she said, gesturing calmly with her hands. "I'm going to take a shower. I'll brush my teeth, comb my hair, get dressed and put on a spot of makeup, then have some coffee. After that, you show me. You have until then to work up the nerve. Sound good?"

He nodded. She nodded back. She placed one hand on his brown lapel, kissed his cheek and left the room.

* * *

><p>When she finally shuffled out to the console room with a half-full cup of coffee in her hand, the Doctor was walking around the control panels, talking to himself.<p>

"Oi," she said. "Private conversation?"

He took the mug from her, set it down on the console, then looked her over pointedly.

"What are you doing?" she wanted to know.

"Enjoying how you look now."

"You think that whatever you're about to show me will change the way I look?"

"I'm afraid that it will. For a little while, anyway."

"Okay, enough. Doctor, stop stalling. Let's just do this."

He took her hand and headed for the door. When they stepped out of the TARDIS, there was darkness, but the TARDIS' interior shed a very dim light through the space. Martha could see that he'd materialised the police box in Ephraim's basement. She could see the instruments around, and what looked like a body covered with a sheet.

"Oh, I know where we are," she said. "Why did you cover him up?"

He didn't answer. He crossed over to the foot of the stairs where the light switch was, and in a moment, the whole room was illuminated with fluorescent light, as usual.

The Doctor was scowling, and he crossed the room, gathering up a few of Ephraim's notebook pages. Martha walked over to the body, and patted its covered head.

"I will preface this by saying: when you read C.J.'s thoughts about Haruka, his sadness and anger, you were compelled to console him. Do you know why?"

"No."

He handed her the stack of papers without elaborating. She took it as an instruction to start reading.

Martha took about three minutes to read over the selective pieces of his life's narrative, all of the material the Doctor had read before examining the inside of C.J.'s ribcage.

Her face was expressionless as she read, and then she slowly moved her eyes up to meet the Doctor's.

"Do you want to read more?" he asked.

"Give me everything you've got."

He nodded, and handed her a separate stack, the pages he'd found and read in the wee hours of the morning, after having put the bone saw away, just two or three hours before Martha woke him from his dream.

"_It took me a bit of time to grow accustomed to my new life with my aunt and uncle – but just a bit. I missed my mum and dad horribly, and until I was fourteen, I still sometimes cried myself to sleep at night. Ultimately, though, I was glad for the stability. _

"_My mother's sister was the illustrious Letitia H. Ephraim, who occasionally appeared in the papers alongside her MP bosses, and was frequently sought-after for 'comment' on this scandal, or that issue. But to me, she was just Aunt Tish, a woman who loved romantic comedies, owned sixty-seven pairs of dress shoes, and was a very good mother to me, in the absence of my own. She also made amazing lemon biscuits, and always ordered the same Veal Piccata whenever we went to the Italian bistro on the corner, though every time, she said she was going to try something new._

"_Her job took her out of town once every couple of months, and I was left with my uncle and cousins for a few days at a time. The cousins were all younger than me, and my uncle used to take me aside and ask for my help in 'keeping them in line'. I now understand that this was his way of bonding with me. It was his way of building a camaraderie, something in common, a shared goal._

"_This uncle, my surrogate father, was Robert Oliver Ephraim. Peculiarly, apart from his children who called him 'dad', he always insisted that everyone call him Robert Oliver. Except for me. I called him Uncle Robbo, which slipped out one day when I was agitated, and he didn't seem to mind. So it stuck. I was the only one who called him that, and it made me feel special._

"_Names became a major question for me at that time in my life. I'd never given it any thought until then, even though my father was only ever known only by a title. Even my mother never called him by anything other than simply 'Doctor,' but it never really occurred to me to wonder why. I have no idea what his real name is/was, and I don't think I ever will. As I understand it, that is one of the great mysteries of the universe._

"_But I digress. My full given name was Clive Jones Smith. Smith was not our surname, obviously; it was an alias my father sometimes used. For the purposes of documentation, since my parents didn't want me not to officially exist on Earth, they decided to make me a Smith. Clive Jones was my mother's father, and as long as I could remember, they called me C.J. That never, ever has changed. But after I'd been with my aunt and uncle for a year, they asked if I'd like to be adopted officially, which included taking their surname._

"_I took months to think it over. To me, at first, it felt like they were asking me to betray my parents by letting myself be adopted by other people, and even to take their name. But over time, I began to realise that I could look into the mirror and see my mother's eyes anytime I wanted. I could look into myself and gain perspective over time and life and existence, which had been a gift from my father. I could think of and dream of and love them any time I wanted, and becoming part of the Ephraim family did not erase any of what I felt for my parents. Besides, my father's name wasn't Smith, and Jones had been my mother's name, and I wasn't giving that up. I wasn't losing any part of them by becoming an Ephraim. For me, deciding to do so became a gesture that meant I was accepting that my natural mum and dad, for my own protection, were never coming back, and that I was honouring the people who had been so kind as to take me in and make me feel as their own. Thus, I became Clive Jones Ephraim. That's C.J. to you."_

Martha very slowly put the papers down upon the table where the desiccated body lay under the sheet. She didn't say anything for quite a while. When she did speak, it was in a low tone, a near-whisper, and she didn't look him in the eye.

"How long have you known about this?"

"A bit more than twenty-four hours. That's all."

"Is this why you covered him up?"

The Doctor nodded. "Indirectly. I opened up the chest. Found evidence of a respiratory bypass and a binary…"

"I see. So the same disease that killed him made you sick because…"

"He's got my DNA."

"But he doesn't have the regenerative powers?"

"Apparently not. Because he's…"

"Half human. Half…" In lieu of finishing, she gestured weakly to herself.

"Yeah."

"Doctor?"

"Yes?"

"Let's go help your friend Lincomb."

"What?"

"I can't deal with this now."

"Okay."

"I know I said that I wanted to face this head-on, and I've been upset with you for pulling away from things…"

"It's okay, I understand. Just tell me when you're ready to talk about it."

"Okay. Can we go back to Sorofrann now?"

"Martha, look at me."

She looked up. She was frowning. Her eyes were drawn and worried, her brow was furrowed, and the Doctor felt that she had aged ten years in the last five minutes.


	19. Chapter 19

**All right, folks. Kaboom. The goal is loud, emotional and desperate. So much is at stake, and I hope I've conveyed it!**

* * *

><p><span>NINETEEN<span>

And over the next two days, the Doctor and Martha gathered all of the samples they thought they'd need from the plague victims, earlier in the twenty-first century, on Sorofrann. For forty-eight hours, they walked from facility to facility, talked to cat nurse after cat nurse. With each other, they discussed only the virus, what needed to be done to isolate a cure, and how they hoped that this strain was attacking a unique enzyme as well. They slept in separate bedrooms in the TARDIS, and hardly looked at each other.

And when they could find no more reason to stay away, they decided to return to C.J.'s lab, and his notes.

"He's probably got a match for this strain somewhere in that storage area," the Doctor said. "It's what I would have done."

He realised what he'd said, and looked at Martha. She was nodding, but not making eye contact. Both of them were thinking separately of how many times the Doctor had said that, upon exploring C.J.'s lab. The Doctor could remember being impressed with C.J.'s hiding of the virus samples' storage space, and then wondering who had taught C.J. to do wiring, since the sonic screwdriver could barely penetrate the rigging he'd done on the little safe. Now that the Doctor _knew_ who had taught him that, it made more sense. He also now knew why the tie he'd been wearing when he met Martha was hanging in C.J.'s wardrobe, and why so many rooms in that house seemed to resemble the cluttered back rooms of the TARDIS.

In the console room, flipping switches and dematerialising… this was where the Doctor felt most like himself. Martha was starting to look more like herself again, as well. The intense scowl had gone, and now she simply stared off into space, her uniquely gorgeous twenty-five-year-old features radiating with a combination of wonder and sadness. But he was afraid that plunging back into that basement would prematurely age her again, and force her to take two more steps back into the taciturn depression she'd been feeling ever since they left for Sorofrann two days earlier.

He attempted to lift her spirits with a throw of a toggle filled with flourish. "And back we go," he shouted.

"Great," she said, smiling, perhaps for the first time since the resort. It was a fake, mirthless smile, designed to make the Doctor feel better, and not a real reflection of her own feelings. But it was a start.

"Back to good old Third From Pluto," he said. "You know, that's a long name. I know it's just a descriptive nickname, given only because it's third from the end in a neighbouring solar system to yours, and the official name of the planet is so long that people had to find something else to call it, but Third From Pluto? That's still too long. Maybe you and I should come up with an even shorter one. Like _Third_ or even _Third From _or…"

"T.F.P.?" she asked, her eyes alive with realisation, but the rest of her features downturned with the same brand of sadness.

"Yeah," he said, conceding. "Like that. And then someone should assign a project to it. Blimey."

"Why do I suddenly feel like every move we make and every word we say is historically significant now?"

"Welcome to my world, love."

Neither of them said anything more until they materialised, back in the year 2065, in C.J. Ephraim's basement. They turned on the lights and dove into the work. They still didn't much look at each other, and both avoided looking at the sheet, which was covering the body of the owner of the house. The Doctor lost himself in the storage room, and Martha tentatively began looking through the journals once again, tearing out pages, categorizing data, just like she had before. She forced herself to put aside anything that looked like a personal entry, and focus on the virus.

Except for once, when she couldn't. A word caught her attention. One word.

"Judoon," she whispered to herself. "Okay, Martha. Just read it – it won't kill you. It's just pages, they're just words."

* * *

><p>The Doctor stood in the middle of the storage room, surrounded by hundreds of petrie dishes.<p>

"Okay, C.J., what did you do with the sample from Sorofrann?" he said aloud. "Fifty-eight years go. Possibly someone you knew?"

He turned three hundred and sixty degrees, then moved around the little room, looking closer.

"Very few labels, and I know it's not alphabetical," he said. "How would you have done this? How would you organise your specimens? If it were me, I'd arrange them by locale…"

He wandered over to the little safe where he'd found the specimen that had killed C.J., and made him, the Doctor, ill.

"You know, it shouldn't be this hard. Someone needs to teach you how to label stuff," he continued. "Or just be less Mandala and a little more linear. I'll have a little talk with Martha about that – I think that'll be her department. That is, if we ever make eye contact again."

The Doctor began to think, if the safe represents C.J. himself, and the planet Third From Pluto, then the dishes immediately surrounding it would represent the planets within this solar system. He expanded outward in the hypothetical direction of Sorofrann, if the room were the universe, and each grid of shelving were a solar system or planetary cluster.

And he found a cluster.

After testing several of the samples in the cluster against those they had brought back from Sorofrann itself, the Doctor had found nothing. But the samples he had tested all had roughly the same texture, which would put them all about the same age. What about specimens that were older?

What he was looking at represented space. There needed to be something to accommodate the passage of time.

He pulled the sonic screwdriver from his pocket and aimed it at the wall. The set of shelves he was looking at moved aside, and another set of shelves appeared behind it.

Upon testing a new cluster, roughly in the same area, only behind the original set, he found what he was looking for.

"Eureka," he whispered.

On the bottom of the petrie dish, there was a number. He stepped outside the little room to tell Martha that perhaps they should now go looking through the journals for that particular number, to find out what the mutation had told C.J., what sorts of intel he had extracted.

But he did not find her as he'd last seen her.

"Okay, new rules," he said to her. "You are no longer allowed to be in this room with the journals alone. Every time I come out of there and see you, you're crying." He crossed the room hastily and took the journal out of her hand.

She took two steps back from him, and without trying to hide her tears, without trying to control herself in the least, she pointed at the journal and said, "That journal has a story about a hospital that went to the moon."

"I see."

"It's a story about rhinoceros people coming into the hospital and searching for a non-human fugitive. In the story, there's a medical student. She meets a man who had been posing as a patient, who is really some sort of freelance alien operative, and recruits her to help him escape from the rhinos, because he's non-human."

The Doctor nodded, and just waited for her to finish.

"That's us, Doctor. That's you and me."

"I remember."

"And it's a story about C.J. Ephraim's parents, and how they met."

"I know."

She fell backwards and caught herself on a wall and sobbed. The Doctor stepped forward to comfort her, but she put out a hand to stop him.

"I've spent the last two weeks," she said, her voice still uncontrollably loud, tears still spilling like rain. "In a basement with the _corpse_ of my child."

"Yes."

With both arms she gestured as though she were imploring _why_. "I'm not even a mum yet, and I feel that loss, that horrible, horrible thing that every mother says is the worst thing that could ever happen to them!"

The Doctor could only sigh.

She pointed at the white sheet. "There is a dead body there, the body of a man. He is desiccated and dried up and reduced almost to bones. And he's my son!"

"Yes, Martha," he said gently.

"I am his mother! That dead thing on the slab… I'm going to give birth to him! I'm his _mother!"_

The Doctor nodded.

"He thinks in certain ways, just like me, because _I'm his mother._ I want to console him, and his stories make me ache because_ I'm his mother_. I'm suddenly thinking in whole new ways, tossed into this cult of motherhood, and I didn't even have the benefit of the buildup! It's not fair!"

"Martha, it's a funny old life, this."

"This is too much, Doctor! Too much! He's my child!" she was practically screaming now.

"He's mine too, Martha. I know." He whispered, in order to keep the emotion in.

"Then why are you so calm?" she asked accusingly. "How can you not want to… just scream and shout and throw things and turn this bloody lab upside-down? How could you have kept this in for twenty-four hours, without it destroying you from the inside?"

"It almost did," he said. "It almost destroyed _us_, remember?"

"I'm not sure that it still won't," she said, beginning to pace around the room. "Destroy _me_, in any case. You seem to be okay with it all."

"Martha, I am _not_ okay with this. How can you think that?"

"Why aren't you pacing around with me? Why won't you yell and scream?"

"Because I've seen worse," he told her, rather more forcefully than he'd have liked. "I deal with information like this every damn day! Granted, usually it's not quite so close to home but… I've tried to explain to you, Martha, it's what I am. It's the kind of thing a Time Lord does. And like it or not, your son is going to have to deal with that lot someday as well. You should get used to it."

She stopped pacing and faced him. "He will, won't he? Oh, God."

"Yes. But fortunately, he won't be alone in it. He won't have the academy like I did, but he'll have me. And I'll have him. And you and I, we have each other."

"We have each other," she said. She walked pointedly at him, and took him by the lapels. "We do have each other now, and Doctor, I love you so much. So much I can't say." Fresh tears, a new kind of tears, fell as she said this.

"I love you too," he said, almost bewildered, as he took her by the shoulders.

"And this is brilliant," she continued. "You and me being together, being in love, _finally_ having this open and honest relationship, it's brilliant. But what does it mean?"

"It means…"

"It means that we're going to have a child, sooner rather than later," she told him desperately. "And sometime before he's fourteen, we'll have to leave him forever. Something is going to go wrong enough that we'll be pawning off our son on my sister and that prig of a boyfriend of hers!"

"Martha…"

"And I could handle it if it meant that we just have a baby and live happily ever after, and we don't know what the future holds, but… I'm going to become a mother, and my life will change. The way I see the world will change. My priorities will turn upside-down. And I will do all of this, living with the knowledge that in thirteen years, I'll have to give it all up! How can I press forward with you, knowing this? How can I ever let you touch me again, knowing that we'll conceive a child who will die alone in a basement on a deserted planet, having worked himself to death?"

"I don't know how to answer that Martha."

Suddenly, her eyes went to worry again and she stepped back from the Doctor, covering her mouth with both hands. He was at a loss, and waited for her to say something.

"Oh God," she whimpered. She put both hands at her abdomen and said, "I could be pregnant already! Do you realise that? This whole thing could already be in motion! That man there, the dead one, he could be growing inside me already, and there would be nothing that I can do about it!"

"I don't think you're pregnant yet," he told her calmly.

"What makes you say that?"

"You'd know," he said.

"Not necessarily," she told him. "I wouldn't necessarily know until…"

"If you were carrying _my_ child, Martha, you would know."

"So, what, Time Lord babies gestate differently? Do they… I don't know, communicate with their mothers pre-birth somehow?"

"Not in the way you're thinking, but… do you remember how I told you about the metacrisis?"

"You mean the thing that could give a human perspective over time, like a Time Lord has?"

"Yes. Well, as I said, there's a certain type of mind-meld thing that happens sometimes that's super-dangerous for the host. Burns them up inside. Another kind is a cellular union. That type is less dangerous, and usually, it just runs its course."

"A pregnancy."

"Yep. If you were pregnant, your body would be host to a Time Lord consciousness, and you'd be able temporarily to see some of what I can see… and trust me, you'd know about it."

"So, what do we do, Doctor? Just go about life, continue having breakfast and playing cards and shagging until I start seeing the Mandala of existence when I close my eyes?"

"Yes."

"It's like waiting for a bomb to drop."

"No, Martha. It's not a bomb. It's new life, it's a good thing."

She gestured toward the white sheet. "Look at what happens!"

"I know. But what's the alternative? Not travel together?"

She sighed. "No."

"Never make love again?" he asked, smiling a little.

She chuckled. "No."

"Decide not to have a child?"

Her bottom lip stuck out a little, and she shrugged, imploring.

"We can't do that, Martha," he said, sighing, perching himself on the edge of the slab.

She was quiet for a moment. "What's stopping me from going on the pill without you knowing, eh?" She knew she'd never do it, and she knew that the Doctor was ultimately right, as usual. She was just frightened and feeling rebellious against choices that she had not been given.

"You can, but it wouldn't work."

"Why?" she asked, annoyed.

"Basic biochemistry. Human biology and Time Lord biology can mesh, sure, because it's natural, it's evolution. But human chemistry, in this case it's fabricated. There'd be no reason to provide for Time Lord biology, so the hormones and doses of… you know what? We're getting off-topic. None of this is the point."

"No, it's not, I reckon."

"The point is, fate would intervene. There's this intergalactic plague that we have to help wipe out, and it's taking _all three_ of us to do all the research required. All three: you, me and C.J. Remove him from the equation and…"

"The plague wipes out more planets."

"And we don't come here, I don't get sick, we don't read the stories about Haruka, we don't fall in love… everything changes."

"I don't like this, Doctor. I feel like I'm being aged against my will. My timeline has been put on fast-forward. I feel cheated somehow."

"I understand why you feel that way, but as time goes on, you'll get perspective. You'll stop feeling cheated out of that time, because…"

"C.J.'s consciousness will allow me to see, once he's conceived. Yeah, I can't wait."

"No. You'll get distance from this experience, from this basement, and you'll start to decompress. The future won't seem so dire, and so right-in-front-of you."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"And are you sure that there aren't any other alternatives?"

"Martha, you know how C.J. wrote about fixed points in history that must always be, things we can't change? Well, I'm sorry, love, but this is one of them."

"How do you know?"

"I just do. It's who I am, Martha."

"He'll know too. I mean, he knew."

The Doctor nodded. "It's there in the journals. The wheels of his existence had been turning since long before his birth, he said. That's what he meant."

"So," she said, leaning against a wall with her arms crossed. She smirked sardonically in anticipation of what she was about to say. "Our love must be. Our lovemaking helps save the universe."

He smiled. "Yes. That helps put it into perspective, doesn't it?"

"It makes it scary."

"It would be scary either way," he told her. For the first time, when he reached out, she allowed him to envelop her.


	20. Chapter 20

**Warning: do not read this in mixed company! The Doctor and Martha are about to be come VERY "okay with" their lot in life! ;-)**

* * *

><p><span>TWENTY<span>

They took a long walk after that. Got some air, held hands, enjoyed the sunlight, spent time together with no talk of fate or time. She got to feel the unabashed thrill of just walking while she clutched his arm and leaned her head on his shoulder. Such a simple pleasure, something she'd longed to do on numerous occasions, and now she could.

Then they retired back to the basement and began looking again through the highly incendiary journals for the number which marked the bottom of the petrie dish, the one whose viral sample hailed from Sorofrann, early twenty-first century. They learned a bit more about its mutation process, and if nothing else, could see that the next strain would begin to attack the cat nuns, which would likely mean the end of the planet. But these were the advantages to having a time machine.

And not so late into the evening, fatigue set in with a vengeance. Martha had always been curious as to why _crying_ could exhaust a person so completely. It was as if tears held iron in them, and leaked out of the body, weakening the system. Upon reaching a good stopping point in the research, she felt as though she might fall asleep standing up, so she leaned on the Doctor while he turned off the lights, and they left the basement for the night.

They couldn't really see the point in continuing the sleep in C.J.'s bed (and they now found it creepy) since they had the TARDIS right there in the house. He led her, half-asleep, into his room, helped her undress and poured her into bed without so much as switching on a lamp. He lay down beside her, realising only then that he, himself, was absolutely knackered.

* * *

><p><em>The two men stared into microscopes together. They sat across from one another, earnestly trying to solve a problem. A kind of contamination had come in where it didn't belong.<em>

"_What am I looking at?" asked the Doctor, looking up at the tall, clever man sitting opposite._

"_Your life," answered C.J., with an easy, disbelieving smile. The Doctor had seen that same smile a hundred times on Martha's face when he was being comically obtuse._

"_Hm," the Doctor said. "Fancy that." He peered once again into the lens, and indeed, in the petrie dish, there was a tiny blue box. It was rectangular, and said _Police Public Call Box_ across the top._

_And then, it started to change. The image of the microscopic TARDIS became slowly distorted._

"_Oh, hello," the Doctor muttered. "It's mutating. What's causing that?"_

"_I am," C.J. answered matter-of-factly._

"_No, no," the Doctor tried to assure him. "I'm sure it's not you."_

"_Of course it is. That blue box contains the life you've had, and the life you have, and want to have, with her. All your memories together, all those adventures with and without her… But, now it's mutating. Morphing. It's going to become something else. And that's because of me. I thought you'd have worked out by now that I'm the contaminant."_

"_Don't say that," the Doctor said to him, frowning. "You are not a contaminant."_

_C.J. looked at the Doctor impatiently. "Come on, now. You know I am. You worked it out long before she did."_

"_A contaminant causing mutation," the Doctor said sadly. "I don't like that."_

"_No, it's okay," C.J. laughed. "Why are you upset about this? You're a man who has morphed into something new nine times now. You should know that change doesn't only mean the death of something. It's as much a beginning as it is an end."_

"_This is different. It's not about me, it's about her. And she doesn't just regenerate."_

"_No. But her faith will. Your love will. Your lives will."_

"_Yeah?"_

"_Sure. Besides, I'm not the real contaminant. The real contaminant is fear and uncertainty, and every child who is born in this universe brings that with him, so it's not like I'm unique there."_

_The Doctor chuckled. "You're right about that."_

"_Look again."_

_The Doctor peered into the microscope lens. The tiny blue box had turned itself inside-out, and was now spinning and gaining momentum and had the appearance of a VanGogh painting. But then, it stopped and began to reshape itself. Within a minute, it was back to its original police box shape._

"_Wow," said the Doctor. "Interesting."_

"_See?"_

"_Yeah. I see."_

"_But you understand, it's only the same on the outside. The guts of the thing are bigger and better than ever."_

"_I get it. You're very wise for a child."_

"_Or a corpse, depending on how you choose to see me," said C.J._

_The Doctor smiled. "Is it okay that you're both right now?"_

"_Of course. Just don't tell _her_that." C.J.'s smirk reminded the Doctor of himself. "As it is, I may never get born."_

_The Doctor then sighed heavily. "I don't know if I'll be able to tell her anything for a while. She doesn't really even want to talk with me, let alone…"_

"_Okay, well, that's none of my business," C.J. said, standing up with his hands raised in a disarmed fashion. "I'm just here to tell you that it won't always be like this. Metamorphosis implies coming out better for it in the end, yeah? But you knew that, already, regeneration man. And she knows it too. Just give her time."_

"_If there's one thing I can give her, it's that."_

"_All she knew when she started this gig was that she loved you. She didn't know she'd be taking on quite such a commitment."_

"_Commitment," the Doctor repeated. "Yikes."_

_C.J. smirked again. "Yeah, that's going to be a word that constantly bothers me, as well. Thanks for that."_

"_Well, maybe your mum can help…"_

"_Doctor, are you awake?" he heard Martha say from outside somewhere._

_C.J. smiled. "Go. Go forth and multiply. Just don't ever, _ever_ tell me about it."_

"_Please, I'm your father. I'm supposed to befuddle you, not scar you for life. What kind of a parent do you think I am?"_

"_Doctor?"_

* * *

><p>"Yeah, yeah, I'm awake," he said, sitting up. Martha was sitting beside him, squinting at him in the dim gold light.<p>

"No you weren't," she said. "Sorry."

"It's okay," he assured her, rubbing his eyes. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing. Kiss me."

"What?"

"You heard what I said. Kiss me."

"Okay," he muttered, a little confused. There was a long pause while he regarded the outline of her face. Then he took it in his hands and leaned over, pressing his lips against hers. She opened her mouth to the kiss, and their tongues met, beginning to dance. She moved in close, letting out a low sigh that held in it a promise. The Doctor was surprised, and more than a little aroused by that beautiful sound.

She moved round in front of him until she was in his lap, straddling his legs. She pulled back and looked at him. When he had helped her into bed, they had both been too tired to do anything but just strip to their underwear. So there she was, sitting across him, and his eyes slid over her maroon lace bra cradling her breasts just perfectly in a tiny light provided by a few of the TARDIS' roundels. She felt him grow rapidly harder, filling the space between them.

She smiled, and wrapped her arms around his neck. She leant forward and whispered, just barely, "Do you want me?" Then she nipped at his earlobe lightly with her teeth.

He gulped. "God, yes," and his hands slid up her back and took hold of her bra strap. Then he hesitated. "Are you sure, Martha?"

"Oh, I'm sure," she whispered, nipping at his neck now. She reached down and peeled the fabric away from his member, and she curled her finger around it a few times gently. A chill, and a violent bolt of desire, slammed through his body, and he had to resist the urge to turn her over and take her.

Instead, he reminded her, "It's a big commitment. It's not just about us anymore."

"Commitment," she said. She sat upright again with her hands on his shoulders, and she looked him in the eyes. "I realise that. And I'm scared out of my mind."

"Maybe we…"

"But I had an epiphany in my sleep," she said."

"Really? An epiphany?"

"Well, a dream," she conceded.

"Did you dream about C.J.?"

"What? No."

"And you were looking into a microscope watching the TARDIS change shape?"

"No, Doctor, I was in a field picking daisies with Winston Churchill," she told him. "And there was a television on, with David Beckham whistling the theme from _Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em._"

He blinked. "Oh. Do you think that's important?"

"Actually, the details are fuzzy now, but I do remember that Churchill said I should think of every new thing as an adventure, which is what I've always tried to do anyway."

"Ah. Your subconscious was just reminding you of something you already know, using an historical figure you respect, so that you'd listen."

"Yes. So Doctor," she whispered huskily, leaning forward again. "I want to have this adventure with you. Let's have this adventure again and again. All night, even if it leads to another one."

"I had my own dream, Martha," he said, trying to catch his breath as she licked behind his ear.

"About commitment?" she asked, not stopping.

"Yes."

She stopped again, and looked at his face. "What am I committing to?" she asked, quite seriously.

"Having a child," he said quietly. "Knowing his fate. Which is not a pleasant fate, let's face it. And that's a huge burden."

"I'm committing to a life with you," she said, taking his face in her hands. She spoke slowly. "I'm committing to loving you, and going through some difficult times by your side. I'm committing to starting an adventure that will be so hard, it might destroy me. But you know what?"

"What?"

"I did that a long time ago."

"You did?"

"Yes, in that alley after Leo's birthday. I knew it, Doctor," she told him. "I knew we were in for a really rough ride. But I knew it would be worth it. I knew that what I could learn from you was worth any risk I could take. Even the risk of getting my heart broken."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. And here we are again, in that alley, Doctor," she said, smiling. She pressed her forehead against his, and whispered, "So let's go."

Her hot breath against his skin made him tingly. He ran his hands up her back again and unhooked her bra. He tossed it aside and bobbed his head down to lick her perfect breasts and nipples. She leaned back with her hands on his knees, and closed her eyes, letting the exquisite sensation wash over her. He bit her gently, and she bucked forward, pressing her soaked knickers against his erection. She ground against him, almost mindlessly, building pressure, building desire within them both.

They got lost in this action, and he became obsessed with memorising the texture of every millimetre of skin between her collarbone and the bottom of her rib cage, against his tongue. At last he couldn't take it, and he gave a guttural growl, pulling himself out from underneath her, sending her tumbling onto her back with a surprised squeal. He dug his fingers underneath the waistband of her pants and pulled them roughly down her legs. This aggression shocked and excited her quite a lot.

He was then up on his knees and she sat up to help him out of his boxers. He was impatient and breathless and wasn't able to completely extract himself before he pushed Martha back down again. Still sitting on his knees, he positioned her thighs on either side of him, and tugged at her ankles, pulling them onto his shoulders. Relishing the shock on her face, he grabbed onto her hips, smiled wickedly and thrust into her, eliciting a deep groan from her, forcing her head back. He pulled back and buried himself in her again, with a broken, rasping sigh. A coarse, heated expletive burst from his mouth as he pushed in a third time, feeling her warmth envelop him, seeing her brown skin unimpeded and sprawled out on his bed, and hearing her voice cutting through the air in pleasure.

A fourth time, then a fifth. Tears were coming to Martha's eyes – he could see them beginning to sparkle in the dim light, and her voice was going higher and higher. He asked her if she liked the position, liked the spot he was hitting inside her, and she responded with an inarticulate mumble. He wanted to continue to torture her, to keep her in this state in which her brain was mush and her body was on fire, but he was beginning to realise that his own brain was turning rapidly to mush, and his own body had long since needed a good dowsing. He couldn't keep up this pace – pull back, pause, push in, pause – much longer. He felt too much need, to much urgency just to give her everything he had until he had nothing left.

So he did. He braced himself and pulled out all the stops. He began pushing, thrusting hard and fast, with abandon. The tears that threatened her now came spilling out sideways, and her hands flew up over her head and grasped the footboard hard enough to make her knuckles go white. He watched her eyes glaze over, listened to her moan, occasionally she'd say his name, but she was gone. She didn't seem to register his presence at all anymore, as if what he was doing was separating her mind from her body.

Then suddenly, she cried out and looked at him with urgency, almost worry. She was flying over the edge, throbbing and gasping, crying out in total release, nearly pulling the footboard loose. This seemed to go on for quite a long time, then lucidity slowly reconstituted itself in her eyes, and he waited a few seconds for her to recover. Then resumed what he'd been doing. The orgasm had made her ultra-sensitive, and his thrusts were now reverberating through her body as though someone was repeatedly banging cymbals in the pit of her stomach. Tears spilled over again, she cried out in small, desperate bursts as he drew closer and closer to his own release.

"It's almost time, Martha," he told her, panting. "Almost time…"

She opened her eyes wide, and locked onto his. "Do it. I'm ready."

He fell forward, pressing his hands into the bed on either side of her, and pushed himself nearer to oblivion.

"Are you sure?" he asked. "Tell me it's okay."

She gritted her teeth and grasped his arms. "It's okay – I want it." She dug her fingernails into his flesh, bracing for what was to come.

He shut his eyes tight. "Promise me it's okay!"

"I promise," she groaned. "We're in this together. Just let it go!"

So he obeyed her. His eyes flew open one more time as his body gave way completely, and he came inside her, exploding as though a geyser had been pent up in his system.

Martha wondered in that moment whether she should be seeing stars collide, time turning on its ear, the vortex pulsing in her mind. But she did not. She closed her eyes and listened to the music of the Doctor's pleasure, and saw nothing. She felt her body fill up with him, she felt sated and exhausted and ecstatic and nervous and vibrating with life – basically the regular things one feels after having fantastic sex. It was the first time in days she had felt she could ever be normal again. If _this_ could feel good and right and normal, then she and the Doctor might be okay.

She was out of breath, and she lay there staring at the ceiling, her body upside-down, with her head toward the foot of the bed still. After a few minutes, she felt him grasp her around the wrists and say, "Come on."

He pulled her into a sitting position, then up to her knees. She crawled back under the covers with him, feeling like a ragdoll. She lay her head against his shoulder, and sank under the surface of full consciousness straight away.

With the last bit of energy she had left, she said, "It's okay, because I have you now."

The Doctor wasn't entirely sure that she was speaking to him, so he just kissed the top of her head and felt her sink into sleep. After which, he followed her down.


	21. Chapter 21

**The story, in case you can't feel it, is now winding down. Just a few more chapters to go.**

**This one is short and sad. I hope you "enjoy" it.**

* * *

><p><span>TWENTY-ONE<span>

Seven more days, very much like this one, passed. Research, exhaustion, lovemaking. It was what they did, how they spent their days, evenings and late nights respectively. Sometimes the lovemaking spontaneously rescheduled itself for daytime, and the exhaustion had no respect at all for the constraints of time. But for the most part, this was how they lived and loved.

The strain of _Malatia Incognita_ that was attacking Lincomb and the rest of Sorofrann in 2007 was labelled MISt041379 in C.J.'s books. The research had them reading or skimming at least four or five journals per day, and by the end of the seven days, they had finished leafing through all of them. Every book that C.J. Ephraim had left in his lab, in plain sight, they had seen and dismantled. The pile containing his memoir was growing thicker, and the pages containing the Sorofrann strain were scattered all over the lab. It was rather an interesting manifestation of what Martha imagined C.J.'s brain must have looked like on the inside. And the Doctor's.

C.J.'s research on MISt041379 led them through a thread of his thinking, almost a stream of consciousness, that even the Doctor could only follow once the relevant pages were all put together. He could see evidence that C.J. was making an effort to be "linear," because at some point, he began leaving notes in the margins cross-referencing certain information with other pieces of intel. But like everything else, the Doctor eventually got the big picture, and C.J.'s puzzle pieces brought him to the answer.

"Deffrozine," the Doctor blurted out on the seventh day. "Of course! Blimey, no wonder it took fifty years to get this far."

"What are you talking about?"

"Deffrozine is an enzyme, sort of like Figlozine," he said. "Pops up in certain places all across the universe. Generally speaking, though, it doesn't exist in the same places as Figlozine."

"Figlozine was the one you and C.J. had, yeah?" she asked. "Stimulates the binary vascular?"

"Yeah, all Gallifreyans have it as part of their biology. And Deffrozine is the counter chemical, carried by the Sorofrannians. It's the thing that keeps them alive for thousands upon thousands of years. It always caused problems because when Sorofrannians, like Lincomb, would come to Gallifrey to be educated, they had to have monthly vaccines against the natural Figlozine that occurred in the soil and vegetation," the Doctor explained. "Because Figlozine reacts with Deffrozine, causes a breakdown of both enzymes, which, if it went on for too long, would eventually kill the Sorofrannian in question."

"Hm," Martha said. "Interesting. You did say that Sorofrann and Gallifrey were sort of like sister planets. It stands to reason that their natural compositions would drown each other out. Two sides of the same coin."

"Yep," the Doctor agreed. "I don't know why I didn't think of this before."

"Well, the research was leading us toward spores," she said.

"Which is still true," he pointed out. "The spores in the air were causing the mutation, but C.J. never actually got down to what the virus was attacking. He never quite worked it out in his own case, either, at least, not in time to…"

The Doctor trailed off. He and Martha had not discussed C.J. for a few days, and their connection to him. But this particular reminder of how the man died did not sit well with either one of them, especially with the body still lying on the slab, covered with a sheet.

He cleared his throat. "Anyway," the Doctor said. "This makes things considerably easier."

"What do we need for an antidote?" she asked, remembering how she had gathered ingredients to save the Doctor.

"Just me," he said. "I can transfer the Figlozine from myself to Lincomb through an I.V. And just like before, the cancelling-out will fool the virus into thinking that the Deffrozine is gone, and it should lift, like it did with me."

"Great."

"Well, now, wait. If we extract from me…"

"What?"

"It's just… it's not only Lincomb we have to cure. We'll need at least a hundred vaccines straight away, and then we can teach them how to replicate the enzyme, and that's just to make a dent! But if we extract the Figlozine from me, that's at least twenty-five samples that we'll need if we're going to get this done in a reasonable amount of time… that much Figlozine leaving my system with no time to replenish, it could stop my hearts."

"Okay. Then we need a new plan." Already knowing the answer, she asked, "Where else do we find Figlozine?"

The Doctor's eyes went to the white sheet. "His cells are dead. But it might work if we can reconstitute them somehow. I don't know… electrically?"

"What the hell? It worked for Dr. Frankenstein."

"All right, so what we need are twenty-five DNA swatches from C.J." said the Doctor. "A bunch of petrie dishes, an I.V. and a sonic screwdriver. Fortunately, I have all of those things in my possesstion. We can replicate the enzyme inside the TARDIS."

"Oh. Wow. Is that all? So as soon as we get DNA, we can just… pick up and go back to Sorofrann anytime?"

"Pretty much."

"We're done here?" she asked.

"Yes."

After over a month spent in this oppressive basement, experiencing, by turns, horrifying fear and unimaginable sadness, Martha looked around the lab, wondering how she could ever leave.

* * *

><p>For the first time in almost two weeks, the Doctor pulled back the sheet that covered C.J. Ephraim's body. He found that he could not look at the face, with its cheeks withdrawn from the teeth, eye sockets empty and dry. The mouth and the eyes, these are the things that made a person seem like a person. They are what we relate to about each other; the smile, the frown, words, the windows upon the soul. These were things, according to the Doctor's dreams, that C.J. had inherited from his mother. He possessed her compassion and wit as well, but those qualities could still be found in the journals. The Doctor did not want to get stuck into searching the dead face for features he loved that no longer existed. Everything that seemed physically human or relatable about C.J. was now gone, so the Doctor simply concentrated on the clinical task at hand: skin specimens from the arms and legs.<p>

"What do we do with this?" asked Martha. She was standing with her back to him, but he knew she was clutching the thick pile of papers that constituted the story of C.J.'s life. "We had talked about putting it all together in order, but… then what?"

"I don't really know, Martha," he sighed.

"I mean, can we keep it?" she asked. He got the feeling that she wasn't really asking him, more thinking aloud. "Do we even _want _to keep it? Do we have the right to do that?"

"No, I don't think so."

"Well, then what? Can we take it with us, and give it to someone who would read it or publish it or something?"

"I'm not sure if we should do that, either."

She sighed and clutched the papers in her hands tightly, almost protectively. "I know we can't take it all with us, all the journals and stuff, but… I just can't bear the thought that his life's work is going to be left here in a basement to rot to dust. A man's soul survives in his writings, this is what makes him immortal. It's bad enough that his body has gone dry – I don't want that to happen to his thoughts, too."

"Martha, his life's work will come to a head on Sorofrann," he told her. "It won't go to dust because we've stood on C.J.'s shoulders to find a way to save the planet. It's why we're here. Sorry, but I just don't think we're meant to have it."

"I know," she muttered. She clutched the memoir tighter, then forced herself to set it down on the stainless steel counter, and she took a step back from it. She turned and began gathering up the rest of the pages, pointedly avoiding looking at what the Doctor was doing, and depositing them back into the boxes into which C.J. had originally packed them.

She wasn't saying anything. She wasn't crying, but…

The Doctor was a Time Lord first, and a man second.

The Time Lord was tuned into the fabric of existence, had been for over nine-hundred years, and frankly, sometimes it was tedious.

The man was tuned into Martha Jones. That was new, and it was exciting and wonderful.

And so, because the man loved her, and against every insistent protestation currently coursing through his Time Lord consciousness, just this once, he let the man win. He said, "All right, we can take the memoir with us. But not the rest."

She turned and faced him, and smiled warmly. "Thank you, Doctor."

* * *

><p>The Doctor swept the floors of the lab, washed and sterilised the petrie dishes that he and Martha had used, and packed them into a little box. He had decided to take them as insurance, just in case he didn't have enough usable ones inside the TARDIS' lab. He unplugged all of the electrical equipment and wound up the cords. He washed down the stainless steel surfaces, and the walls. He took the wooden chair, the last place where C.J. had sat, upstairs to the fireplace and burned it. He replaced all of the chemicals they had used on the shelves around the room, including the fabric softener. Then, he lined up the prepared samples, the ones he had found in the secret storage room, for replacing.<p>

He started with the MISt041379 sample, and closed off the wall with the sonic. Next, he replaced the samples from neighbouring planets. Lastly, he reverently carried the deadly strain that had killed C.J. into the storage room. He set it down carefully, and went about opening the safe once more. It took him a while, even with the sonic, but it was work that he enjoyed, because he felt it was _his_ work, as though he were solving a puzzle that _he _had set for himself, or another version of him.

Moreover, the Doctor wanted to put that particular sample back exactly where he'd found it… he wasn't sure why. Something about this safe felt good to him, felt right, like it suited him somehow. It was the first evidence he'd had that C.J. had had an extraordinary education, and he had begun to think of it as a symbol of C.J. himself. It was clear, at least to the Doctor, that C.J. had thought so too, given the "geographical" arrangement of the petrie dishes.

At last, the safe was open, and the Doctor knelt, held the dish in his hand for a few seconds then put it softly down inside the safe. He stared at it sadly, then went back to re-calibrating the locks on the safe so that he could shut it securely. He worked it from the back, since he had the door open.

The walls of the small-but-secure box were black, and as such, the inside was dark. But the blue pulsing glow of the sonic screwdriver illuminated slightly the interior of the safe, and something caught the Doctor's eye. Something green. Something he had missed before because it was a dark shade of green, and the Doctor hadn't known the importance of absolutely everything around him, everything in this lab, and everything about this safe.

He frowned with curiosity and reached in, realising that the surface on the right side of the box was actually paper. Or rather, something made of paper was leaning against it. He slid it out. It was an envelope, forest green, fancy, like from a stationery set. It was beat-up, like it had been tossed about quite a bit.

The Doctor looked at the writing on the front of the envelope, and all certainty went out the window. He had to catch his breath while his Time Lord self short-circuited for a few frightening moments, trying to understand.

* * *

><p>Meanwhile, Martha did a slow sweep of the house, ostensibly to make sure they weren't leaving anything behind. Really, it was a long goodbye. She tried to think of it as a <em>hello<em> as well, but the stillness of the air, the overwhelming feeling of something ending, would not let her.

From the bedroom, she collected their pyjamas and toiletries, and she resisted the urge to take the Doctor's tie from the wardrobe. She put everything in order, including the clean scrubs, and left the place in ridiculously neat condition.

She brought it all down to the basement where the TARDIS had been parked in the corner for over a week. The Doctor was just then emerging from the storage room, tucking the green envelope into his breast pocket. As an afterthought, she gathered up the pages of the memoir, tied them long-wise and short-wise with some burlap twine that C.J. had on a spool in the lab, then put them into her rucksack. She took all of it into the TARDIS, into their bedroom, and set it down on the floor to be put away later.

As she entered the TARDIS with her cargo, the great vessel groaned uneasily. The Doctor heard the complaint from outside.

"I know, I know, I'm sorry," he said aloud to his trusted ship. "She'll work it out for herself. Just give her a chance."


	22. Chapter 22

TWENTY-TWO

Martha Jones cried in tight, intense sobs against the shoulder of the Doctor's brown pin-striped jacket. She was grasping the sleeve between her fingers like a child. "No-one should have to go through this," she said, tears gushing down her face like rain. "It's unnatural. It's not supposed to work this way."

Alongside the TARDIS, they were standing in a vast field of spongy yellow grass, a stone's throw away from where they had gone picking berries. On that day, in the Fluddberry field, they had, with some difficulty, discovered their love for one another, and a then a rainstorm drove them into shelter, and into each others' arms. They had chosen this spot because it was meaningful, as well as beautiful, it was familiar, and it was peaceful.

"No, it's really not supposed to work this way," the Doctor agreed. "Every fibre of my being is protesting against this. And not just because I'm a Time Lord and this is a really messed-up situation."

She looked up at him sadly, almost apologetically. Periodically over the past few days, she'd been realising how self-centred she had been about the revelation of C.J. She'd catch herself forgetting that he was the Doctor's son, as well as hers, and that his pain, even though he was used to navigating time and knowledge in a non-linear sequence, was just as real and intense as hers.

"Is there anything you'd like to say?" he asked her.

She stepped away from him and shielded her eyes from the early-evening sun with her left hand. She looked down at the ground in the clearing they had made. Upon the flattened yellow grass lay the body of Clive Jones Ephraim, wrapped in a white sheet.

"There's lots I'd like to say, and someday I'll say it all. I'm not ready to give him any words of wisdom yet. I'm too young and he's too old."

"Not often you have to consider your child being older and more experienced than you, is it?"

"Not for normal people, no. For now, I'll just say _hello_, and _goodbye._" She managed a little smile. "How about you?"

He took a deep breath and said, "I've been down similar roads with my children before, Martha, but nothing appropriate ever comes to mind when it needs to."

She took his hand and whispered, "I'm sorry. I'd forgotten."

"So, why don't we let C.J. speak for himself, eh?" He reached into his pocket and pulled out the tattered green envelope and handed it to Martha.

"What is this?" she asked, taking it.

"I don't know what it is, but I know who it's meant for."

She looked at the writing on the front as the Doctor had, and she covered her mouth and nose with her free hand and wept uncontrollably for a minute or two. She let it fall from her hand, and the Doctor picked it up. He gazed once again upon the writing, slightly larger than they were used to, but still clearly C.J.'s, which read "To Mum and Dad."

Martha seemed to get control of herself, although just barely. She kept her hand over her mouth and nose, as though it were physically holding in the next great swathe of sobs.

"Shall I read it out loud?" the Doctor asked.

Martha nodded slowly, not moving her hand, not looking away from the body on the ground.

The Doctor opened the envelope and extracted two or three large, thick sheets of paper, unfolded them, and began to read.

"_1__st__ September, 2026, 11:15 p.m., London._

"_Dear Mum and Dad: As I write this, I am sitting in the bedroom that I've shared with my cousin Roger ever since the night you said goodbye. My half of the room is empty. The shelves have been cleared of my books and mementos, my posters are no longer on the walls, and tonight, I will spend my last night here. Tomorrow, I turn the room back over to Roger and his terribly classy pin-ups of girls in bikinis fondling Ferraris, and join the ranks of the learned. Orientation at Cambridge University begins tomorrow afternoon at 4:00, and Aunt Tish and Uncle Robbo will be driving me up there in the morning._

"_I'm writing this because in less than twelve hours, I am almost literally closing the door on a chapter of my life, and I can't help but want to sum up my extraordinary life with the Ephraims. What better, more satisfying way is there to do that than for the very people who were not fortunate enough to witness that life? You should know, Mum and Dad, it was a good, warm life. I feel so lucky to have had the best of both worlds. You taught me lofty things, amazing things. Time and space, adventure, bravery, honour, the price of being special. You showed me why you continue to do what you do, even if it kills you, and you showed me the rewards of benevolence, humility and empathy. You also gave me a foundation of love and togetherness and feeling safe and wanted. _

"_But the Ephraims were fantastic parents to a semi-lost adolescent boy, especially Uncle Robbo. He had an investment in me that amazes me even to this day. I was a very weird kid by their standards. Aunt Tish had some experience and knowledge of the phrase "Time Lord" and sort of understood where I was coming from; Uncle Robbo understood none of that. He had no context for my uniqueness, and no ties to me other than those he chose to cultivate and nurture. He taught me how to live in the world as a human being. In spite of my fervent protestations, he insisted, every Sunday, that I go to church with the rest of the family. For so many weeks, I sat there sulking, thinking about the futility of it, of God, governing one's life by a mythos, salvation through faith in one deity. But then, I began to see the everyday, less-cosmic application. Uncle Robbo took me to the church-run soup kitchen that Christmas, and we fed the homeless. I found that even if I didn't believe that Jesus Christ would save my soul, I absolutely _could _espouse the Christian values of love and generosity, understanding and inclusiveness. Uncle Robbo gave me the church and the soup kitchen to apply all of that, but you gave me the tools to understand. We have ladled soup every Christmas and New Year's, and one weekend per month, ever since then. Except for one time three years ago when I was sick with flu._

"_The things that Aunt Tish and Uncle Robbo have taught me have inevitably caused your voices to reverberate through me. Uncle Robbo tried to learn to play cricket with me, like you used to, Dad. He was rubbish at it, but he tried really hard. Aunt Tish always told me to try and find the best in everyone I meet, like you used to, Mum. All four of you always told me to be myself, be the best me I can be. And who am I? Who will I be? Tomorrow is the day when I begin to think about that in earnest, it's quite literally the first day of the rest of my life. I'll be a traveller, an adventurer, an investigator. A scientist, a researcher, a physician. A nephew, a grandson, a cousin. And always, the son of Martha Jones and the Doctor. Take away any part of it, and the whole house of cards crumbles. Thank you for helping to make me someone who can stand against the wind._

"_Tomorrow is a big day, and I am nervous and excited. As I have during every momentous event in my life, I wish you were with me. But I accepted long ago that that probably won't happen ever again. Though I understood why you did it, I was angry with you when you left, and I was even angrier a year later when I realised you weren't coming back. But I have always, always loved you and cherished what little time we had together. Someday, I will do my research on that insane character we seem to be hiding from, and I will find out if and how I can help, and where, if anywhere, you are now. But until then, I will honour you at Cambridge and wherever else I go, by being everything I can be. Mum, I still want to be a nephrologist, an internist, a biology fiend, like you. I still have your eyes and your smile and your family, and no-one will ever be able to take those things away from me. Dad, you know what I'm going to say, don't you? I can't escape who I am, and neither can you. Inextricably, I'm your son, and there's no getting away from that, no matter how far across the universe you run, no matter how often I change my name._

"_And even if I never see you again, I have faith that you will read these words someday. Something tells me that somehow fate will intervene and tell you everything you need to know (and probably some things you really _don't_ need to know)._

"_I will close this letter with simple words that signify this, a kind of regeneration of my life: _hello,_ and _goodbye.

"_Your son, Clive Jones Ephraim."_

By the time the Doctor approached the end of the letter, he was in floods of tears and his voice was quavering fiercely. Martha was squatting, pulled into a tiny ball near the ground, face hidden, her entire body jerking with sobs. When he finished, he immediately let go of the letter, dropped to his knees, and grabbed onto her. They stayed in the field for a few minutes just so, on their knees and clinging to each other as grief washed out of them in great gushes.

When she seemed slightly calmer, he was able to calm himself as well, and he asked, "Are you ready?"

She stood up and nodded, wiping her eyes.

He reached inside the TARDIS, where he had left a bottle on the floor just inside. It was acetone from C.J.'s lab. He unscrewed the top and emptied the liquid onto the white sheet. Then he extracted a good old-fashioned plastic cigarette lighter from his pocket and lit the sheet on fire. The flames had no trouble spreading over the body and as it happened, Martha felt herself calming, strangely.

She watched for a minute, then she picked up the letter off the ground where the Doctor had dropped it. She re-read the ending.

"Where did you find this?" Martha asked the Doctor as he watched, hands in pockets, fire consuming the body of a truly special person.

"In the safe. Couple hours ago."

"Do you think he put it in the safe because it was a precious document to him?" she asked. "Like maybe it represented his last hope of being with his parents again?"

"No, I don't think that's why."

"Do you think he knew?"

"Yep."

"He knew you'd get into that safe someday."

"Yep."

"When he wrote it, he knew that?"

"No, not when he wrote it. At that time, it would have been just... like a shadow of knowledge."

"Because he was too young."

"No, because he didn't have quite enough information yet. As things start to unfold, Martha, the circle of existence, how things are connected, they become clearer."

"So when he was dying and he chose to put it in the safe?"

"By then, yeah, he knew."

"Because… how?"

"His birth, his conception even, is an immutable point in history – he'd always known that. As soon as he was capable of conscious thought, he'd have known that."

"Have _you_ always known that?"

"No, because it doesn't revolve around me. I come into these pieces of knowledge once in a while, sometimes on a need-to-know basis, more often it just sort of drifts through me randomly. Or seemingly randomly, until I realise why."

"So if I asked you to name some other fixed points, could you?"

"Yes, but most of them are because I've encountered them in some way, or been in danger of derailing them."

"So when did you know about C.J.? When you were in danger of derailing him?"

"I started to feel it as soon as we entered that basement the first time. Remember, I said there was something about him… just something. I didn't know how he was connected to us until I read all the journals, and I wasn't sure about the fixed-point thing until then…"

"But before that, your Spidey senses were tingling?"

He chuckled. "Yes, very nicely put."

She paused and watched the fire, thought about the fixed points, the Doctor's Spidey senses, for several minutes before she spoke again, softly. "Okay, so help me understand. At eighteen, he already knows his conception is a fixed point. He's got a _shadow of knowledge_ that says you and I will… what, cross paths again with him?"

"Cross paths, touch the same space at different times, something like that. And as he got older, especially after he opened up the TFP Project, he would have worked out _why_. He probably realised just before he fell ill that he wasn't going to finish the research, but he would have known that the virus doesn't wind up wiping out the universe. At that point, it would all come into focus. Who finishes the research? Who gave him the seeds of the TFP project? Where did that person get the information to do that?"

"Blimey."

"I think, anyway. I'm just assuming 'cause I know how these things work in my own head."

"Logic?"

"No. Mandala."

"I thought so."

They fell silent again and watched the fire. They couldn't walk away because they didn't want the field lighting up. They had cleared a large space, but a good gust of wind could foil their plans.

"You can go back inside," the Doctor said. "I'll keep watch."

"No, it's all right," she said. "I'm okay to watch this. I feel much calmer now. I don't know why."

"Closure?"

"Maybe. Fire equals closure. Hm."

* * *

><p>They held each other as the final orange embers faded away, and the field fell completely black. Ashes and darkness were all that remained now, and from here, the wind would blow them wherever they might, on this interesting little planet. The Doctor and Martha trudged back into the TARDIS, he suspended the vehicle in deep space, and they shut their adventure on Third From Pluto out of their lives for the time being. They indulged in a few silly movies, food that was bad for them, and each other.<p>

They just needed a rest.

Eventually, they regrouped and went back to Sorofrann, to finish the last step in this part of the C.J. saga.

* * *

><p>It took a little less than a week to constitute enough Figlozine to counteract the Deffrozine for the first one hundred patients. As it turned out, the cells they had extracted from C.J. were not quite sufficient, since they had been so long dried up and dead, so the Doctor wound up giving a bit of blood to the cause. Though, it was not enough even to make him feel the weakness. And in fact, his cells were the perfect complement to C.J.'s, and the Figlozine diffused clearly and cleanly, and was ready for injection quicker than the Doctor and Martha had anticipated.<p>

They cured Lincomb first, followed by the first 98 people they could find who had lab experience, medical training, etc. They used the remaining vaccine to split up into further samples, and began showing the newly-cured, and the cat nuns, how to "grow" their own Figlozine inoculations.

They gave "seminars" of 15 people at a time over several days, right there in the TARDIS' lab. The Doctor spent quite a bit of time catching up on lost years with Lincomb, and Martha spent quite a bit of time catching up on lost sleep. She seemed extremely tired during this time, but the Doctor didn't feel it was out of order, considering the shock and exhaustion the past month had bestowed upon them.

* * *

><p>One day, still parked on Sorofrann, while the Doctor and Martha were overseeing the ends of the first leg of the inoculation process, Martha woke up and dressed like usual, then came into the console room. The TARDIS groaned as it had the day when they'd left C.J.'s house, uneasily, bitterly. Martha seemed to tune into it this time. She looked up into the Time Rotor and stared into the soft golden light. The Doctor was watching from where he'd been standing at the controls, and he could see that something was amiss behind her eyes. It wasn't a blank stare, it was a gaze of curiosity or communion or...<p>

It wasn't the first time she had noticed the TARDIS "talking" to them before, but it was the first time she'd stopped and stared this way. He waited and watched.

Finally, Martha whispered, "Oh, no. Can't have it."

She turned and marched out of the console room and headed for the bedroom.

The Doctor sighed, patted the console and said to his vessel. "I told you she'd work it out for herself, eventually."


	23. Chapter 23

**This is the end of our saga, friends. This is a tying-up of loose ends. There are a lot of mini-chapters here... hope you find it all satisfying, rather than fragemented. Or too sentimental.**

**Thank you so much for reading, and for all the love! You guys are the bessssst!**

* * *

><p><span>TWENTY-THREE: EPILOGUE<span>

He found her in the bedroom, rifling through the rucksack she had brought aboard on the day when they'd left Third From Pluto. It had been three weeks almost, but she had not yet had a chance to put everything away.

"What are you doing?" the Doctor asked her.

"Finding this," she said, standing up with C.J.'s memoir in her hand. "We can't have it, Doctor."

"What changed your mind all of a sudden?" He knew the answer, of course.

"I don't know, it's like… I just know now that it's not okay for us to keep this memoir in the TARDIS with us. It would cause a paradox."

"It would?" he asked.

"Yes," she told him impatiently. "Well, not a paradox, more like a… time knot."

"Time knot?" he asked.

"Or a whirlpool. Like… time couldn't flow through here in a normal way. We'd have localised loops and things circling back in on themselves. I'm surprised it hasn't occurred to you yet!"

"Yeah, fancy that," he said with a bit of sarcasm, but she missed it.

She started to pace. "We can't have this document aboard the TARDIS because our son wrote it. Our son who hasn't been born yet. It's the story of a life that hasn't occurred, and a good chunk of it will occur in this TARDIS."

"Yes, it will."

"The TARDIS can travel in time, but since it's part of the heart of the story, in its individual timeline, and C.J. is connected to _you_, and you're connected to the TARDIS, the TARDIS feels uneasy."

"Yes, she does."

"And… it's a little bit like having two versions of the same person in one place at the same time." She was still pacing.

"Yes, it is."

"And that looping around thing, that would cause little glitches in the vortex, which would jostle her about even more than usual, weaken her."

"Yes, it would."

She stopped pacing and stared at him. "Why are you just standing there? Why isn't this bothering you?"

"Oh, it's bothering me," he replied with a smile.

"Doesn't seem like it!"

He continued to smile, and approached her. He took her in his arms, and she went into them almost reluctantly. He pressed her against his chest and mused, "Oh, Martha. Do you know what you're saying to me?"

"Yes. I'm saying we have to jettison C.J.'s writing."

"Because it will cause a disturbance in time."

"Yes."

"A disturbance that's now disturbing you. Like, from the inside out."

"Yes."

There was a pause while he waited for her to catch up. When she didn't say anything he pulled back and took her by the shoulders. "When was the last time you felt a disturbance in time, in your gut?"

She thought about it. Tears came to her eyes, for what felt like the thousandth time in the last month. "Never."

"That's right."

"Oh, Doctor," she groaned. "This means…" She walked backwards and sat down contemplatively on the edge of the bed.

"Yes, it does." He was smiling. He found that he was excited. He hadn't known he would feel this way when the news came.

He liked the feeling.

Martha sat there with the memoir in her lap, staring at the burlap string she had tied round it. It gave her a nervous, inexplicably "off" feeling just to have it touching her, having it so close to her body. The soul of C.J. was alive and well in Martha – she could see that much.

She didn't like the feeling.

"Blimey," she murmured. "Is this how you feel all the time? This disturbance in the gut?"

"Not all the time," he told her.

"Is this what you felt when you first saw the body in the basement?"

He nodded.

"Have you felt this way since we left, since the memoir's been in the TARDIS?" she asked.

"Yep."

"I'm sorry, Doctor," she said. "I wish you had said something."

"Nah," he replied, swatting the suggestion away. "I didn't like the idea of forcing you to leave it behind, and I knew you'd realise it on your own someday soon."

"Well, now that I have," she sighed. "What do we do with it?"

* * *

><p>They walked hand-in-hand through the mayor's mansion, which was being prepped for repair and remodeling. They made their way to Lincomb's office, and knocked on the door.<p>

"Doctor?" he asked from inside.

"And Martha," answered the Time Lord.

"Come in!"

The Doctor opened the door and Lincomb was standing at his desk, looking as healthy as a horse.

"Good morning, my friends," Lincomb chirped. "What can I do for you on this fine day?"

"Well," the Doctor answered. "We came to say goodbye."

"Oh yes? I'd hoped you could stay longer, see the full fruits of your labour."

"You can manage without us," said the Doctor. "You've got your medical team trained to replicate the enzyme now – you don't need our help."

Lincomb's face softened into mild irritation mixed with amusement. "That's not the point, old friend, and you know it. Please stay."

"Sorry, mate," the Doctor replied. "We can't. We have to move on."

"But," Martha added. "We have a gift for you."

"That's not necessary," Lincomb told her, holding his hand out to stop her. "You two have given us so much already!"

"We insist," she said, turning his hand palm-up, laying the memoir on it. "Besides, it's not so much that we're giving you a gift, as asking you to keep this safe for us."

"What is it?" asked Lincomb flipping through the corners of the writings.

"It's the memoir of an extraordinary man," the Doctor told him.

"Who?"

"The Researcher," the Doctor said.

"Wow, really? That is indeed extraordinary!" Lincomb mused, amazed. "Doctor, this should be in a museum somewhere, not here in my office."

"No," the Doctor protested. "We really want you to have it. You're the only one who will understand it."

"I find that hard to believe," Lincomb said absently, peeking at the pages.

"Of course you do, right now," said the Doctor. "But once you've read a bit, it will occur to you."

"What will?"

"You'll see. Take care of it, Lincomb, and take care of yourself."

Licomb set the memoir down on his desk, and he and the Doctor shook hands, then hugged.

"You as well, Doctor," he whispered. "Thank you. Both of you."

He hugged Martha as well, and then she left with the Doctor, a new life and a new set of worries ahead.

* * *

><p>"Feel better?" asked the Doctor as they approached the TARDIS.<p>

"Yes. Don't you?"

"Oh, yeah."

"The time knots in my tummy are gone for now."

"Good. Next come the oddball cravings, you'll love it," he said, unlocking the door. They went inside. "Now, where to?"

"Well," she said, sitting down on the navigator's chair. She leaned back and rested both hands on her abdomen. "Nowhere with high levels of radiation, smog, alcohol or undercooked meat."

"Okay. Siberia it is."

"By the way, how long will this go on?" she asked, indicating her stomach.

"Nine months," he shrugged. "You're a medical student and you didn't know that?"

She looked at him, annoyed. "This is _your_ child, Doctor. You don't do things on the same timetable as I'm used to."

He smiled. "Well, it's _your_ body running the show here. Nine months, just like any other kid."

"Great. C.J. wrote that he came early, that we didn't make it back to London in time. Let's plan ahead - maybe we can get to a hospital after all."

"We can try, sure."

"This part of the story _can_ be rewritten," she said, closing her eyes. "He needs to be born, but… I think it doesn't matter where. Am I right?"

"You know you are."

She opened her eyes smiled. "This is so weird."

"You'll get the hang of it," he promised. "But there's plenty of time for that. How about the here and now?"

She chuckled. "You know what? I know exactly where I want to go."

She dug into her pocket and extracted her mobile phone, and dialled, wandering off down the for a bit of privacy.

"Tish?" he heard her say after waiting about ten seconds. "Hi, it's me. How are you?"

The Doctor smiled as he set a course for London, 2007, two months after Dana and Bill Chin's wedding.

* * *

><p>"I'm great, Martha," Tish responded. "What's got into you? You sound worried. Is everything all right?"<p>

"Yes," said Martha. "More or less."

"Well, it's funny you should ring – I was just about to call you. I have some news," Tish said. "But I don't want to tell you over the phone!"

"I'm calling because I have some news too," Martha told her.

Tish squeaked. "Really?" Then she let out an excited little cry, with no words.

Martha laughed. "Yes. Are you and Robert Oliver free for dinner tonight?"

"Sure," Tish agreed. "Bringing your Doctor, I assume?"

Martha smiled. "Of course. Seven o'clock, Rialto Bistro?"

"Yes! I'll make reservations for four."

Martha closed her phone and walked back to the console room.

"So?" asked the Doctor.

"Apparently she has some news as well," Martha said. "We're meeting them for dinner at seven tonight, whenever _tonight _is. Oh, bollocks. I forgot to ask her what day it was."

"I had the TARDIS lock onto the date as soon as you made your call. We're fine."

* * *

><p>When the Doctor and Martha arrived at the Bistro, Tish and Robert Oliver were already sitting down, cooing at each other and sipping champagne. From across the room, Martha could see the big glint of light reflecting off Tish's new engagement ring, and she muttered, "Blimey, it looks like she's wearing a diamond doorknob on her hand!"<p>

They approached the table and both Tish and Robert Oliver jumped to their feet. Tish rushed over and hugged her sister, while the two men shook hands. As soon as the hug was over, Tish stuck her ring out for Martha to inspect.

"Wow!" Martha exclaimed. "I'm blind!"

"I know, right?" Tish shrieked.

"When did this happen?" Martha asked them both.

"Two nights ago," answered her sister, sitting down again. Everyone else followed suit. "He surprised me with it while we were out sailing."

"Nice," the Doctor said to Robert Oliver, with a smile.

"How did mum react?" asked Martha.

"She doesn't know yet."

"We're waiting a bit to tell her," Robert Oliver said. "She's not exactly president of the Robert Oliver Ephraim fan club."

"She'll come round," Martha said to him, sympathetically. "You're wonderful, and she'll have to see it eventually."

"Thank you, Martha." Robert Oliver smiled delightedly, an innocent radiance coming from him, which Martha had utterly missed the first time she'd met him.

"What about you?" Tish asked. She peered over the flowers and champagne glasses at Martha's hand. "I don't see a ring…"

"No," Martha said, feeling heat creep up. "We have a different kind of news. But it can wait."

"In that case," Robert Oliver said, leaning forward. "Why don't we make a toast?"

"Great idea, sweetheart," Tish chirped.

Robert Oliver took the champagne bottle and filled or re-filled all of the flutes on the table, then he lifted his own aloft. The other three did the same.

He looked at Tish. "To a great woman whom I love and cherish and frankly don't deserve," he said. "To our life together. To what is, and what's to come, to the many surprises ahead! To Letitia Jones!"

Martha brought the flute to her lips, but at the last second, the Doctor placed two of his fingers over the rim of the glass. She was surprised, and looked up at him. He was sipping, and he fluttered an eyebrow at her. They maintained eye-contact for a moment, and both smiled.

A wicked smile was spreading across Tish's face. "Ooooh, I saw that!"

"So did I!" Robert Oliver echoed.

"Yeah, well, why don't we finish celebrating _your_ good news?" Martha asked, blushing.

"No way you're glossing this one over, little sister!" Tish exclaimed. "How far along are you?"

Martha looked at the Doctor. "We don't know, really."

"We just found out today," he said.

"When do you go for your first prenatal visit?"

"Erm, again," Martha said. "We don't know yet."

"Are you going to treat her, Doctor?" asked Tish.

"Probably, yeah."

"How romantic!"

Martha, the Doctor and Robert Oliver all laughed. "If you say so," Martha said.

"Are you going to find out the sex of the baby, when you can?"

Martha and the Doctor looked at each other. "Yes," she said.

"I'll know anyway," the Doctor said. "I'll be doing the ultrasounds and stuff."

"I have an inkling that it's a boy, though," Martha said.

Robert Oliver smiled. "It would be wonderful to have a son."

Tish nudged him. "We will someday, just be patient."

* * *

><p>Women, especially sisters, tend to do things in pairs. For the Jones girls, that included going to the washroom before dessert. Martha had asked the Doctor to order her a couple of Madeleines and a decaf coffee, and had stood up to go refresh her makeup, and had invited Tish to come with her.<p>

"Tish," Martha said, putting on lipstick, talking to her sister who was in a cubicle. "Would you mind if I spent some time with Robert Oliver, just the two of us?"

"No, why?"

"I just want to get to know him," Martha said. "I want to know who…"

"Yes?"

"Who my sister is marrying. Who's coming into the family. That's all."

"Sure. Nice idea. Maybe your Doctor and I can go for a coffee or something too."

"Yeah, he'd probably like that."

Tish came out of the cubicle and washed her hands. She dried them, then turned to her sister and patted Martha's as-yet completely flat stomach. "What does it feel like?"

Martha wanted to answer that it was the most bizarre sensation ever, to close her eyes and see the threads of existence winding themselves throughout time and matter and events. She wanted to say that it was terrifying knowing that she was going to bring an ultimately doomed person into the universe, and extraordinary knowing that she and her child and her Doctor would help save many galaxies from plague, and that Tish and her future husband would be a part of it.

But she said, "Weird. Wonderful. Scary. Nauseating."

Tish chuckled. "Well, I can't wait to be an aunt again!"

"I can't wait for your big day too!" Martha said.

"I know! Can you still be a bridesmaid six months from now?"

"Why not?" Martha asked. "Just let me wear a solid colour, or I'll look like a beach ball."

"Oh, I'm thinking eggplant and taupe for my colours. You can wear whichever suits you."

"Lovely. Venue?"

"Don't know yet, but we have a short list. What do you think of..."

* * *

><p>Leaving the restaurant with her head on the Doctor's shoulder, she said, "So our dates with Tish and Robbo are next Tuesday?"<p>

"You know, you shouldn't get caught calling him that. He'll think it's weird."

"Yeah, I know. Do you think you can get us to next Tuesday?"

"Of course."

"I mean, we can't let months and months go by before we decide to come back. I don't want to have grown noticeably in girth by then."

"I'll get us there. You just worry about…" he said, turning the key to the TARDIS.

"What?" she asked, entering, tossing her jacket on the rail.

"Incubating. I'll worry about parking."

"And where will you be taking my sister for coffee?"

"She says there's a Starbucks round the corner from Robbo's flat. What about you?"

"We're going to get a Gyro together in Hyde Park," she said. "Good sign, adventurous eater."

"Are you going to ask about the godparents thing, or do you want me to do it?"

"We should really do that together," she replied. "Maybe after they get married."

"So," he said, putting his arm around her. "How are you going to handle that god-awful non-Chiswick accent of his?"

She thought about it. "I didn't even notice!"

"I knew you weren't a snob, Martha Jones," the Doctor said. "Seeing him through your son's eyes makes him different, doesn't it?"

"Yeah," Martha said, smiling. "Can't un-see it now. He's a really good man."

"Yes, I think he is. When does he become officially part of your illustrious clan?"

"Six months from tomorrow," Martha answered. "You know, if we hop forward in time, I could be a bridesmaid and still be thin."

"Sorry, I think that might just be cheating."

"Yeah, I see that now," she said, chuckling. "I'll have to come back periodically for fittings and showers and stuff. We'll need to keep track of time."

"You can do that yourself now," the Doctor said, smiling. "At least for a while."

"She's going to have eggplant and taupe."

"Excuse me?"

"Purple and tan. Colours for the wedding."

"Ah."

"She's got her eye on a Vera Wang gown already, and she wants her friend Charlie to play guitar at the ceremony. She's always said the cake would come from Daniel Hessman's Bakery. Designer cakes. Of all the strange things…"

"Martha?" he interrupted.

"Yeah?"

"Do you want all that?"

"What?" she asked, surprised.

"You're musing. I've never heard you muse before."

"No, Doctor. I don't want all that. I'm just excited for my sister."

"We can do it, I suppose," he said, thinking, staring off beyond Martha. "We'll have to stop moving around for a bit, stand still and let the festivities unfold… I reckon I'd have to scare up some mates…"

"Doctor, stop."

He cleared his throat and looked at her, crossing his arms.

"We don't need to do that," she said. "I'm a girl. I take irrational joy in knowing the details of someone else's wedding. Doesn't mean I want one of my own."

"Okay, okay," he said quietly, nodding.

"Unless _you_ want to."

"No. It actually sounds like my idea of hell. I was just… you know, in case you wanted to."

She smiled. She came up and wrapped her arms around his middle. "Thank you, Doctor," she said. She took a deep breath, suddenly overwhelmed with emotion. "I love you so much. And it means the world to me that you were willing to do that for me."

"Well, I know C.J. wrote that we never did any of that, but that could change too. Maybe you'll feel differently after he arrives. I reckon you'll start to feel different about everything."

"I reckon I already do," she pointed out with a deep sigh.

They were silent for a few moments, then he said, "Want to go and scout out a bedroom for him? We have like four hundred of them, just piled with junk."

"Okay," she said.

They joined hands and marched down one of the back hallways, for now, happy just to be _them_.


End file.
